


Through a Forest Wilderness

by Reikah



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: 2017 Handers Olympics, M/M, Miscommunication, Post-Game(s), Red Hawke, Team Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 10:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11079993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reikah/pseuds/Reikah
Summary: Three years after the Kirkwall Chantry explosion, Hawke and Anders are still puzzling out this 'inciting revolution' thing together, one step at a time.Written for the Handerslympics 2017!





	Through a Forest Wilderness

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2017 Handerslympics! I was on Team Canon.
> 
> My prompt card was 'The Magician'; & I went with one of the 'upright' definitions - 'new beginnings'.
> 
> (nb: the Hawke in this fic is my red!Hawke, Leo - for those of you who have encountered Leo before, in my Valentine's Day fic [Bound](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9726977)... this story is set significantly before the last act of Bound.)

If Leo Hawke had to choose, he'd say that the worst _fucking_ thing about Orlais wasn't the accents or the fashion or those shitty masks or even, surprisingly, the millennia of smug imperialism - it was the fucking weather.

Orlesian weather, like most of its citizens, went too suddenly from one extreme to another; summers would bake you alive and autumns wash you clean away - and the less said of the absolute humid hell that had been their last spring, holed up in some backwater village too small to have more than two rooms in its inn, the better. 

Not for the first time, Hawke regretted Varric's choice in safe houses. He would owe the dwarf for the rest of his life, a debt that he could never and would never repay; but he had a bitter, biting suspicion that Varric's choice of holes to hide in this last year - fishing market warehouses reeking in summer sunshine, tanneries marinating in piss, a border tavern more latrine than tavern - had less to do with their safety and.... well, rather more with his companion on the _Wanted_ posters splashed across Chantry boards from Perendale to Fereldan.

Anders never complained. That came as no surprise. His life these days seemed to revolve exclusively around the revolution, ramping always upward; the day they'd heard the Templars had broken from the Chantry once and for all to massacre the First Enchanters gathering to vote, Hawke had had to all but sit on him to keep him from marching on the White Spire by himself.

"This is exactly what we needed," Anders said eagerly afterward, leaning across the rickety wooden table as Hawke diplomatically tried to decide how to halve their meagre meal for the evening - a wedge of hard cheese they'd been nibbling away at for the last week already. "We _needed_ the Templars to stab themselves in the belly like this - rebel so spectacularly for such an awful reason."

"Mmm," Hawke grunted, angling the knife a little to the right so that Anders's portion of the cheese was the larger. He could see the hollows under Anders's eyes in this light, like sockets in a grinning skull's face; neither of them had had breakfast. Only one of them was a Warden.

"How are they going to sell it?" Anders was smirking. "'We wanted to murder mages and the Chantry wouldn't let us, so we're going rogue?'" Their rebellion is as selfish and flimsy as ever. People must see that. _Mages_ must see that. No more talking about the ones slain by Templar hand as if they brought it on themselves - now we can all see the true face of things."

"Either way," Hawke said, pushing the cheese at him, pressing it firmly and insistently against the back of his hand until Anders picked it up and took a bite, "It's not our problem. We've got enough trouble. How's the arm?"

Anders pulled a face at him, lifting his arm briefly in acknowledgement; the scar was a thick red line, raised and angry, running from his elbow to the back of his knuckles. He'd only just stopped needing to wear the splint that kept the bones in place while the wound healed, magically fast, and Hawke had had no tolerance for his complaining about it; the sling was a small price to pay given that the wound had been left by an axe. If Anders's reflexes had been a little slower, his spirit-gifted connection with the Fade a little weaker, he wouldn't be sitting there opposite Hawke right now, knee jittering with impatience against the floor and pulling the most surly expressions as he tried to eat his stale cheese.

There had been too many of those close calls for comfort.

From outside there came the thump of marching boots; Hawke popped his own piece of cheese in his mouth and chewed it quickly, just in case, but the boots strolled right past. Templars were marching along the docks throughout the town in patrols of six or more, and the Carta dwarves who were Varric's contacts in that particular part of the boondocks had already warned them that there was nothing in the warehouse crates worth dying for. Hawke, who had once come within three feet of raw lyrium and been violently ill for a week, had not considered it worth pushing his luck investigating.

For a while they sat in silence, listening for the boots to _thunk, thunk, thunk_ out of earshot along the dock planking; then Hawke shook the tension off somewhat literally, not unlike his dog, which promptly mimicked him. 

"We're only a month’s travel from the Spire," Anders remarked. The cheese was all gone. He didn't look like he remembered it had even been there at all. His face was bright, his cheeks touched with a kind of fervent colour; Hawke supposed he should be thankful Anders hadn't been fucking glowing. "Where are we bound next?"

Hawke finished chewing, or at least made a big deal of pretending to, and wiped his fingers on his lap. "A fishing village further north," he said. "Varric's... 'friends' are loading us up with the merchandise - no, don't look at me like that, we're not going any fucking closer to the White Spire."

Anders had a small blue crack spidering along his cheekbone. Leo wondered if he even knew. "We need news, Hawke," he said. "We have to know if any of the First Enchanters survived, if -"

"We did our part," Leo interrupted. "We -"

The dog, lying on the floor by his feet, started growling. They both fell silent, listening intently; the _thunk, thunk, thunk_ noise had returned, advancing the other direction, and took a long time to pass. The dock was smaller than Hawke had guessed. Either that or the Templars knew about the contents of these crates, and were giving the lyrium... extra attention.

He waited until the patrol had passed completely before leaning in close, and Anders met him halfway; foreheads almost touching, his eyes on Anders's, Leo said, "We got the revolution started. All that visiting Circle to Circle? We did our fucking part, Anders; now it's on them."

"Revolutions are like a fire," Anders said, "You light the kindling that's already there, but you don't leave it. You have to keep adding fuel, Hawke. Let us go to the White Spire."

Leo glanced away. The docks were quiet. Fang was sitting on his hindquarters beside their table, eyes locked on the door, hackles up; his staff was in reach. He grabbed it, and saw out of the corner of his eye Anders doing the same; blue lightning poured in slow motion across Anders's skin, splintering in jagged lines from his cheekbone to his knuckles and onward, a soft glow that lit up. Anders was still watching him but Hawke knew his attention was elsewhere.

"Maybe tomorrow," he said.

"You always say that," Anders said, scowling. and then the doors burst in with a thundering _smash_ , shards of wood and sheets of dust filling the air, the Templars hooting and hollering near as loud as their fucking armour clanked; Fang dashed forward with a bark that bounced from the walls and Hawke caught the nearest one with a mass of dense force magic, right in the chest, and there was, for a time, a great deal of noise and violence.

Later that night - blood washed off and on a boat headed north, on the open deck nestled under sleeping bags that smelled that sadly familiar smell of _Dwarf_ , and _Carta dwarf_ specifically at that - wedged in between crates of lyrium that would kill them both if ever opened, and with Fang himself eeled in between _them_ \- Anders added, "We didn't come this far for the fire to go out now, Leo."

"Yeah." Leo stared up at the stars, scattered across the night sky like beads of lyrium, and wondered what stupid names they had in Orlesian. "I know, Anders."

When he closed his eyes, he still saw red on the back of his eyelids; the way it had rained onto his father's bedsheets every time he coughed, seeped so slowly from the stitching around his mother's neck, pooled under Bethany's body where it lay crumpled. He had touched her once, after the fall, on the shoulder; there had been nothing under the skin, no bones left of which to speak. 

Sometimes he saw Anders, too. In those moments Anders hadn't caught the axe with his forearm - or Justice hadn't been strong enough, and the blade had carried right through, undeterred. In those dreams Anders glowed red, a red that gradually dimmed, and Leo felt that dimming in his very bones.

He shivered and turned his head, and saw only Fang, nestled between them for the warmth. The night sky was crisp, and carried the faint scent of snow on the breeze, and Maker, but he had learned to hate Orlesian winters.

* * *

Mont-de-Glace was a typical Orlesian city, all elegant spires and white marble, cafes and fountains and lion statues everywhere but nowhere more obvious than flanking the gallows in the city centre. Room enough there for six to hang abreast, comrades in death; Anders eyed the wooden scaffolding with disdain from beneath his hood, his lip curled quite unconsciously. 

The lion statues had a light dusting of snow, mantling around their granite shoulders like cloaks; the hangman's crossbeams and lever were bald, fresh. A note had been pinned up - one of many, copies in a learned hand much neater than Anders's own - warning of MALEFICARUM OPERATING IN THIS AREA and giving concerned passers-bye a laundry list of symptoms claimed to be the result of a blood mage's spell. Anders wondered briefly who had devised the list. The Circle he had grown up in had murdered anyone suspected to be touched by a maleficar's magic, not asked them to _describe_ it.

"Reward's the same," Leo said beside him, and when Anders glanced at him, confused by the non-sequitur, jerked his chin at the Chanter's board next to the gallows. New copies of their posters had been tacked up, the same artist's inaccurate rendition of their faces miniaturized so as to fit both portraits on one sheet of paper. They had, as always, made a complete bungle of his face and nose, and drawn Leo with a caricature of a chin bordering on the offensive - but they had caught his eyes. Even on paper, Leo's eyes were arresting, defiant, wild.

 _Wanted dead or alive for the murder of Grand Cleric Elthina and two hundred and eighty-nine innocent souls in Kirkwall_ read the charges beneath his portrait. Might even be true. Anders hadn't stopped to count the bodies under the rubble. _Wanted alive for conspiracy to murder_ , read the charges under Leo's portrait. Varric had been hard at work; that book of his could be found on every market stall from here to Rivain - and Anders had looked. _Five thousand sovereigns together_ , read the reward number beneath their portraits.

Every time he saw the reward money listed he remembered the first few months after he had met Leo, watching him run himself and Carver ragged to raise just a fraction of that amount. "If you gave me in, you could retire quite comfortably," Anders remarked blandly, and sensed more than felt the sharp, indignant way Hawke looked at him.

Leo wouldn't, Anders knew. But they were two years on the run, and there were more greys now in Leo's hair, more lines around his face and scars across his skin, and Anders... 

Even the best of them would be having doubts by now, and Leo was the best of them all. Anders loved him - with all his heart, he knew that beyond any shadow of disbelief - but he was, despite his lofty goals, a realist at his core.

"It doesn't matter," he said, turning away abruptly. "Anything on the White Spire?"

Leo's face was cold and still. "No," he said, shortly. "Our friends are meeting us in the inn. We can ask there. Just - try not to get carried away."

Hawke could bloody well speak, Anders thought - especially with the amount of blood he had shed, too. Wild, angry, a soul stifled and crushed and desperate for justice - that had been what drew Anders to him in the first place. Watching him butcher Templar hunters on the Wounded Coast, and then turn to Thrask, amber eyes sharp and bright, wet red smeared over the bridge of his nose, and strike up conversation like it was nothing at all...

The inn they chose was on the northern edge of the city, popular mostly with the merchants coming to arrange the purchase of the copper mined from the mountain itself. It was large enough to boast a minstrel, who sat on a stool by the hearth fire and sang a jaunty song about an idiot fishermen who had set out to sail the Sea of Ash, having mistaken it for a real sea; the song was popular enough most of the patrons were singing along with the chorus, and nobody noticed Hawke and Anders as they ordered soup and took a seat in the corner by the door.

A tavern-girl bought them their soup - fish, caught just that week from the Sundered Sea. Anders had never had anything like it - it was heavily salted, mostly to encourage liberal refills of the wine, but he and Leo ate theirs methodically regardless. Leo said - blowing steam from his spoon, eyes on the minstrel - "Varric's friend has red hair. He's a merchant, like us."

"What do we deal in?" Anders asked.

Hawke shrugged. "Whatever we fucking want," he said. "Turnips. Dogs. Who gives a shit? Nobody'll ask."

The minstrel slapped the box of her gitar to signal the end of the song, and the patrons stamped their feet in joy. She accepted the praise with a duck of her head and a small twist of a smile. "Thank you, Monsieurs," she said, her voice throaty and flavoured with a thick Orlesian accent; even after more than a year wandering the country Anders could not identify the region it was from. "A reminder, if you please, that if you enjoyed my performance Madame de Cotre -" a hand gesture indicated the bartender - "- Will be accepting tips and tokens of your esteem on my behalf."

"She has red hair," Anders pointed out, hushed, but Hawke just shook his head and mopped up some more salty fish soup with his bread.

"My next song will be the old classic, _Empress of Fire_ ," the minstrel told the crowd, "Please sing along if you know the lines. But before I begin, the Vicomtesse and the Grand Cleric have asked me to relay this news every hour - apologies if you have heard it before."

Anders licked the back of his spoon thoughtfully. Hawke ducked his head, but Anders could see his eyes narrow. He knew that look, the tensing in those broad shoulders. The minstrel fiddled with the pegs of her gitar, strummed a long, sorrowful note, and said, "It is with an heavy heart that, on behalf of the Grand Cleric, I must inform you that the Circle of Magi have voted to break their long and true bond with the Chantry." The crowd stirred. Anders glanced sharply at Hawke, who had part-turned toward the minstrel; the fire caught on the right-hand side of his face. "They have voted for independence, for a new Kirkwall, for war -"

"Magic _must serve man_ ," a man in a green wool coat called from a table near the stairs. 

Anders cleared his throat, ignored the way Hawke grabbed his wrist sharply, and called out, "What of the Templars?"

The minstrel played a three note chord. "Gone, gone, gone," she sang, "The Nevarran Accord left behind, forgotten. War has already begun, further north of here."

"Stop _smiling_ ," Hawke hissed at him, bread in hand; his face was hard, uncompromising. Anders lowered his head but found his heart thudding away in his chest, a funny sensation; they had done it, done the impossible, Kirkwall had been the weak point and he the chisel, and now the whole thing was crumbling. They would survive. They had to.

"Good sirs," the minstrel called, her trained voice cutting over the low susurration of people discussing her news, "There is yet more to come. The Circles and the Order began their battles a month ago - but it has taken some time for the news to travel. Unfortunately, news is not the only thing that travels under the path of the raven's wing. The village of Rouzen, at the foot of the mountain along the Sundered Sea, has reported a large band of wild mages in the area - carrying staffs and wearing robes. Where they have come from, we do not know. What they want, we do not know." She played another note on her gitar, held it; the tavern had fallen so quiet the sound passed without much contest to all corners of the taproom, wavering and sad. "How we are to be rid of them - we do not know."

"As if we were Darkspawn," Anders muttered. Hawke hissed at him again, and he ignored it; mindless vermin, that had been all the ever were to the Chantry, albeit lucrative vermin, on occasion.

"Some Templars are still loyal to the Chantry. The Grand Cleric has sent word," the minstrel said, "In the meantime, great care must be taken, for those of you travelling to Rouzen."

"No," Hawke said flatly, grabbing his wrist.

"We're going to Rouzen," Anders said anyway, and pulled his hand away with difficulty; Hawke's fingers were tight. "We have to, love. Those people - if there's a survivalist among the lot I'd be surprised. They _need_ help."

"Varric's people are -"

"Leading us on a breadcrumb trail to nowhere," Anders snapped. "Round and round in circles - apologies for the pun."

Hawke's face didn't so much as twitch. The lines around his mouth were already etched deep, had been for three years; but they were deepening by the second as Anders watched. "Are you trying to get yourself caught? Is that what you _want_?"

"Are _you_ trying to let _them_ get caught?" Anders pushed his half-finished bowl of stew aside, palms prickling; he could feel that restless energy he always felt, when they were on the edge of a triumph of sorts. Alrik dead at his feet, Meredith's shocked, clueless face - the red light at his back - and Hawke, his mouth open before Anders's, long ago and far away. He had fought so hard to reach this point. Someone at a nearby table got up to make their way to the bar; he ducked his head in close to Leo's, whose mouth was a flat line. He could feel Fang's nose under the table, brushing against his knee. "The Circles are _broken_ ," he hissed, his eyes on Hawke's face. "Everything we have done is worth nothing if we cannot keep free mages free."

"And if you die?" Leo's brow was furrowed; his eyes roamed over Anders's face, searching. "If you die, Anders, then what?"

"Then -” Anders paused. Hawke's shoulders were tense, his elbows digging into the wood of their table. His stubble was a mix of salt and pepper, and the lines around his mouth had been there for too long. "I made my peace with death," he said, very quietly. He had. Long ago, back in Kirkwall - sela petrae, drakestone, Hawke's face - _there can be no compromise_. "I love you," he said, because it was true, "And I don't want to leave you. Not like that. But... some things matter more than my life. I'm sorry."

Hawke said nothing. That was not, in and of itself, atypical with Hawke; he had always preferred to speak with his body, and normally Anders could read his heart in the slope of his shoulders and the set of his jaw. Today he was carved all from stone, solid and unyielding.

"Varric will welcome you back," he said, turning his head away. "Aveline, Merrill - them too. Kirkwall would forgive."

Hawke snorted, looked away. "Doesn't matter what I say, does it? You're going after them anyway." 

"Yes," said Anders, and Hawke sighed: deep, true, from the chest. Anders watched him, watched the quirk of his brows and the movement of his jaw as he clearly debated, internally, on the next plan of action; Fang bumped his knee again, very lightly, and he slipped a hand down under the table and scratched his lover's mutt between the ears as he waited. Hawke looked like a man who was struggling, struggling in a way Anders - for all the years he had loved Leo, for all that they had shared - could not begin to understand.

Finally, he seemed to come to some decision. He caught Anders's eye, jerked back his chair, and rose to his feet, rolling his shoulders as he did so; he looked a giant from where Anders was sitting. "Let's get a move on," he said, "Soup was salty as fuck, anyway."

Anders smiled in gratitude, but it was too late: Leo had already turned away.

* * *

Rouzen was a small fishing village on the shore of a sea that, even in the height of summer, had ice floating across it; its people were hard and cold, and Orlesian to the bone. They reacted to enquiries about the rogue band of mages with the same disgust as if Anders had asked them for intimate details of their private lives.

"Are you a Templar, monsieur?" "Have you ever fought a mage?" "Do you know how to banish a demon?"

"We're in the area," Anders would say, smiling winningly. "We've fought and killed darkspawn. Who knows how long it will take for your Templars to arrive?"

Hawke had never been able to manage the level of charm Anders could, when he made the effort. He kept quiet, Fang sticking close to his heels, and stared people down until they gave him what they want; the mages had been sighted east of here, and the general theory was that they were attempting to circle the mountain on which Mont-de-Glace had been built and cross into the Western Approach over the mountain range. Estimates on their numbers were wild and unhelpful, ranging from a meagre six to well over a thousand, but three separate accounts mentioned the mages being laden down by heavy packs, and possessing no baggage train to speak of.

"Are there many natural threats in the mountains?" Anders asked one fisherwoman, a whippet-thin lady in her forties who had her little finger stuck in her ear the entire time they spoke, digging around for an irritant. "Bandits, wolves?"

"Wolves," she said. "Bears too. Nobody goes there but foresters from our village, and Sur-dans-Leon along the coast; there's nothin' for bandits to prey on."

"Wolves and bears probably wouldn't be much of a threat to a large group of mages," Anders said, frowning.

"Prob'bly not," she said, with a vicious grin "But if they fail, there's always the dragons."

There were three dragon nests that she knew of, along the mountain peaks - two Highland Ravagers and a Kaltenzahn, from the way she described them - and further north, along the Gamordan mountains, the Stormriders. The dragons were too smart to bother the villagers, but they ate the bears and wolves, and any large fight would likely attract their attention. Not so long ago a hungry bear had attacked a group of foresters, injuring them - they had slain the bear with their axes and pure adrenaline, but the shouting and chaos of the fight had brought the Kaltenzahn down upon them, terrible in her might; she had killed two of the foresters before dragging their bodies, and the bear's, back to her nest.

Hawke grunted. Dragons complicated things. That had been a pattern in his life before, and looked to be no different now.

They purchased some spare clothing, and extra rations of food - for themselves and for Fang, who obligingly let Hawke put his harness on him and load up his saddlebags with the more portable necessities. The weather was dire, snowy and biting, and if they weren't mages Hawke had no idea how they would have even considered it - but Anders was undeterred. There was colour in his cheeks, and light in his eyes, and when they settled down for the last night before leaving, in the woodcutter's loft (for which they had paid thirty silvers for the privilege), he was warm in Hawke's arms. 

"What we're doing," he said, blue cracks playing out along his throat, long fingers undoing the buttons of Hawke's trousers, "Hawke, it's vital. Free mages! Mages who made a choice, who broke from the Circle - we have to see them safe."

Hawke hissed as cold air whispered under their sleeping fur, sticking long fingers uninvited in sensitive places; Anders, impatient, eager, rubbed Hawke's cock with the heel of his hand. "Careful," Leo warned him.

"Thank you, love," Anders said, like Hawke was doing him a favour, and Leo scowled up at the ceiling rafters. "I know you didn't want to come, but - we're doing a good thing."

He still didn't get it. Leo wished, not for the first time, that he had been the one to inherit Mother's eloquence, not Bethany; it would have solved a great many problems. As it was, he reached down, caught Anders's wrist, and pulled his hand out of his trousers. "Too cold," he said, when Anders looked at him with curious eyes burning blue.

It _was_ cold. He rolled away, buttoning his trousers back up, and felt Anders reluctantly doing the same. When Fang slipped in between them, smelling unpleasantly spicy and wet, Anders huffed once in dissatisfaction, but did not press the point.

They left early the next morning, chewing breakfast - dried fish - on the road. The Sundered Sea bred fish small and quick, with meat held close to the bone, and the chewing kept them all three - man, dog and spirit - quiet for a while as they slogged through the white forest. Hawke had the tent, Anders the cookware, and the food had been split between all three of them - but they had snowshoes and Fang simple leather boots, waxed to keep the cold and wet from his paws, and therefore his load was the lightest.

The dragons didn't make an appearance until that evening - one of the Highland Ravagers, by Hawke's eye, lazily winging her way overhead with a bear clutched in one back foot. They hid under one of the snow-capped fir trees until she passed, watching carefully until she flew over the mountains and out of sight. Anders said, "Hopefully the mages saw her before they caught her attention."

Hawke grunted agreement. The forest was still around them, like even the birds were holding their breath; once the songs began to resume they made their way onward along the southern slope of the mountain.

Fang slept between them again that night, even in the confines of their tent. He licked Hawke's face a couple times, as he settled, and Hawke saw Anders watching but Anders looked away as soon as he realised he had been observed. The wolves howled until the stars rose, and Hawke lay there in the gloom with Fang's head resting on his shoulder and strained his ears to catch the sound of Anders's breathing, in and out, steady as a heartbeat.

* * *

It was two days before they came upon their first sign of the mages. Anders hadn't worried about finding them - there was only one real path to travel, one route to take, and he knew that he and Hawke, provisioned and armed with snowshoes and a mabari, would catch them sooner or later. They had holed up for the night in a copse once popular with loggers, probably during an expansion to Mont-de-Glace - bare stumps stuck up out of the dirty, trampled snow like middle fingers. 

There was a fresh cairn on the eastern side of their campsite, stones placed with precision. However many mages there had been, the march was taking its toll.

"They lit a fire here," Hawke said, crouching by one of the stumps. "Scorch marks on the wood. No sign of kindling - must've used mana as fuel."

Anders frowned. Risky, but not surprising. Firewood needed to be dry; the snow outside the campsite was thigh-high at the least, and more had fallen last night. "We're on the right path," he said, covering his eyes with his hand. The snow had been flattened, heading north - a trail made by many boots. He couldn't tell how many but guessed more than six, three times that number at a minimum. Maker only knew how many they had lost to make it this far - but they had, because death in the wilderness was clearly preferable to butchery by Templar.

"We should try to catch them before nightfall," he said, and Hawke shrugged his shoulders in agreement.

Fang barked from the other side of the camp; he was sniffing around the tree stumps, pissing up most of them. The howling wolves had been annoying him for days, as if their nightly chorus was a challenge to fight. Hawke whistled for him and he bounded over, holding in his mouth a long object - when Leo took it from him he passed it straight over to Anders. It was cold to the touch where it had been half-buried in the snow - a leather knife sheath with a crystal set in the flap. Unenchanted, but definitely too impractical and ornate to belong to anyone other than a mage.

"Here," Anders said, holding it back out to Fang, "Do you think you could find the person this belonged to, old boy? Or their friends?"

Fang barked scornfully, ran around the pair of them twice, pissed up a tree stump while maintaining direct eye contact with Anders ("Charming," Anders said, while Hawke just laughed) and loped off toward the north. Shouldering their packs, they fell in after him.

They didn't find the mages by that evening, but the evidence of their passage grew stronger - snow flattened, threads of hair and clothing caught on trees - three more cairns. The latter worried Anders enough that he urged Hawke to push on through the night, using magic to keep themselves and the dog warm; Hawke argued, but eventually relented in the face of Anders's focus. They marched onward, spells burning, the Fade swirling around them like a cloak, and about an hour before dawn they crested a gentle hillock among the foothills of the mountains to see a campfire burning a handful of leagues ahead of them.

Hawke said, "I hope you know what you're going to say to them."

Anders snorted, rubbing at the ice forming on his beard. "I'll offer our help," he said. In the gloom he knew Hawke was looking at him mostly from the whites of his eyes, in stark contrast to the rest of his silhouette. "You saw the bodies. They can't possibly say 'no'."

Leo's grunt was his only response, which was fair. Anders hadn't actually planned this far. It didn't matter. He would do what was needed, regardless of the consequences; that had been his goal from the start.

* * *

The mages were mostly a disorganized lot - thirty of them, at least, if Hawke were any judge, and mostly content to mill around their campfire; their arrival at the camp was challenged by a single sentry, too close to the fire to be any real use. "Halt," he said, in a surprisingly rural Fereldan accent, holding up a hand as if that could stop them. "Who goes there?"

Anders held his hands up, arrestingly friendly; his smile was bright and sure. He wasn't glowing. "A friend," he said. "We were in the area and heard of your plight. We thought we should see if we could offer you our assistance."

By this time the mages by the campfire had scrambled to their feet, retrieving staffs slung from backs and resting against rocks. They were a miserable bunch, some of them still wearing their useless soft Circle slippers and clad in light shawls - they must have been burning mana to keep themselves warm. The sentry wore a wool cap too practical to be of Circle make. "What Circle are you from?" he demanded.

"Most recently, of none," Anders said, carefully, "But I was Harrowed at Kinloch Hold in Fereldan."

"Don't _look_ Fereldan," said the sentry. "That nose - that's Anders."

"Dog's Fereldan, though," Hawke said. Fang, keeping nicely to heel, barked, and then barked again when the mages looked at him; he stood up and shook himself off, tail wagging like a blur. "I'm Leo," he said, "and that's -"

"I know who you are," said one of the other mages at the back of the crowd, loudly, and then clapped her hand over her mouth when the rest of the group looked at her. "I've got your poster, I - look, Brevan, look -"

She hurried over to the side of the sentry, who still had his palm held out, and fished a crumpled and much-folded piece of paper out of her pocket, unfolding it with trembling hands; her breath came quick and her eyes darted between Brevan and the two of them, nervous. Brevan glanced at the poster and then at the two of them, and repeated it; then, he scowled so deep and thick it left a huge line cleaved into his forehead.

"Do you see?" the woman said, and then turned back to the rest of the mages, brandishing the paper, "Do you see? He's got the eyes! There's the dog! They came to _my Circle_ before I was transferred, before the revolt - they spoke to our Libertarians, the blackguards - did anybody else meet them?"

Hawke kept his hands up. He'd been through this before, several times, and Anders's shoulders were loose and relaxed.

"Yes," said Anders, "I'm Anders. You've heard of me. And that is Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall -"

The mages muttered softly amongst themselves; Brevan snarled, "So it's you we should thank for the Templars on our backs, then? Murderer!"

Anders lifted his chin. Hawke breathed in and out, well aware of the weight of his staff on his back, and thought of barriers - not in specific, he left his mana well enough alone, but he thought of the idea of a barrier spell, the shape of it, the way the Fade felt pulled through and in the palm of his hand. Just in case. Anders said, "I was not the one who chased you into the wilderness, you know."

Brevan spat on the snow in front of him. "As if they'd've done that if not for you," he sneered. "Everything they did, they did because of _you_ \- and madmen like you. _Murderer_."

"They did it because they _could_ ," Anders said, his voice clear and firm, "They did it because they thought they _should_ , because they never saw us as people to begin with. I tipped their hand, but I tipped ours as well - and it was their fear of us that motivated them all along."

"Tell that to the dead in Kirkwall," said someone in the crowd, viciously.

Barriers. Strong and thin. Fang was dead silent beside Hawke, watching the crowd with the intensity only a guarding dog could manage. Anders shrugged it off like water off a duck's back and said, "I'm telling it to you, now. I saw the bodies you left behind, and I am sorry for that. I came because I thought you might need help. The people of the region know you're here - they've summoned Templars to find you."

This caused a great deal of noise amongst the mages; Brevan had to shout to get their attention. "Listen! _Listen!_ Templars don't obey the Chantry anymore," he said, "They've got enough on their plates. We don't need your help, monster."

Hawke cleared his throat. "Templars broke with the Chantry because they wanted to butcher you all and the Chantry said 'no'. Not a good sign for you."

"He's right," said one of the mages, a short plump woman with long dark hair braided over one shoulder. "The Templars haven't been our friends for years, Brevan."

"Because of _him_ ," Brevan snarled, jerking his chin at Anders, who accepted the accusation with a philosophical shrug.

"Does it matter _why_?" Another mage asked, a tall Rivaini woman. "He's a monster - who cares? So are the Templars. Or did you forget the butchery at the first Conclave?"

"Better the monster on your side than the ones not," added an elvhen man, looking nervous.

Brevan's jaw was tight, but his eyes were defeated. "So you'll prove them right? Accept the aid of murderers? Child-killers?" Hawke scowled. "Are you foolish or mad?"

"Alive," said the dark-haired woman, "And I want to stay that way."

Leo decided that he liked her. She spoke sense, and something about her reminded him, with a twinge to the chest, of Bethany - the way she cocked her head, the careful but considered manner of speaking, the edge to her voice. She held her staff tightly in one white-knuckled grip, and her eyes were darker than anybody in his family's - but the reminder was there, all the same. He glanced sideways to Anders, who was watching the mages argue with a keenness to his gaze; Brevan's insults were nothing neither of them hadn't been called a hundred times before, and Anders had always accepted the things Thedas said with a calmness Hawke couldn't. _Hunted. Hated. The whole of Thedas will be against us,_ he'd said at the time, aware always of his fate in the history books.

There were mutters of agreement coming from the gathered mages now. "Harlow's right," called a woman with an Antivan accent, and more heads nodded.

"If we want to cross the mountains and get to the Western Approach, we're going to need _some_ help," Harlow added, bolstered by the attention. "You, ser - Anders." She said his name hesitantly, as if it tasted strange under her tongue. "Can you do it? Can you get us there?"

Anders stirred like a cat uncoiling from a nap; he folded his arms over his chest and looked at her long and straight, nothing but naked honesty in his gaze. "I'll do what I can," he said, and his voice sounded steady, unyielding. "We'll need some information first - how many of you there are, what supplies you've got, what schools you can cast, how your rations are looking - and where you came from and where you want to be."

Brevan scowled, looked at his fellow mages - clustered around, in their ragged clothing, the faintest tinge of apprehension on their faces - and sighed. "There's thirty-six of us now," he said, and then, glancing away, admitted, "... We were fifty five when we left. If you can help us, we would be..."

"We would be grateful," Harlow said, and smiled.

Hawke looked from her to Anders, watching the way the skin at the corner of his eyes wrinkled, _just so_ , and thought - _now you have them_.

For whatever that was worth.

* * *

Of the thirty-six mages, three were Tranquil - two men and a woman. They had come because they had been asked, Brevan said shortly, when Anders queried this, and he filed it away as a mystery for another day. All three were dressed warmly, in practical gear clearly donated by their fellows, and met Anders's gaze with customary calmness.

"I was a herbalist," said one of them, when Anders asked. She was a middle aged women with hair gone to grey, and eyes the same colour; she had given her name as Elia. "At the Circle I brewed the potions to be sold and enchanted their bottles with lyrium in order to preserve them. I have an excellent knowledge of the herbs in this area. Before my magic manifested I was a woodsman's daughter, and I remember some of what he taught me."

That made her more useful than her two fellows, both of whom had been born in city Alienages, specialised in enchanting magical armour, and who were functionally useless.

The next mage to give him pause was an apprentice - a girl in her early teens at best, much slighter and smaller than her peers, and wearing a fine wolf's pelt that had most likely been intended for a noblewoman's fashion accessory than a vital part of a winter wardrobe. She was far too young to be Harrowed, and bristled under Anders's gaze; when he asked her age she looked at him with the lofty disdain only a teenage girl could produce. "Fuck you," she said.

"Watch your fucking mouth," Hawke said shortly, scowling at her from Anders's side. Anders shook his head at him and Leo looked away, his mouth tight.

"That's Lisse," said Harlow when Anders went to her to help tally the food stores. She looked as weary as she sounded. "She's fourteen," she said, "And... very sullen. We've not managed to get much out of her, I'm afraid; she arrived about a week before the vote, she hadn't even been assigned to an Enchanter for study. We're not all seasoned battle-mages, I'm afraid."

Anders glanced at her sharply. "Not all? But some of you are?"

"I was studying to be a Knight-Enchanter," she said, and smiled with just a touch of pride at his expression. "They thought I was responsible and obedient enough, no matter my fraternity. It was our Circle's speciality." At his blank look, she shrugged. "We're from Montsimmard," she said.

"I thought Montsimmard was full of Loyalists," Hawke chipped in. He was taking food parcels from their bags, setting them side by side on the snow - building a group stockpile.

"It is," Harlow said, as she helped Anders and Hawke take stock of their supplies. "We're Aequitarians. We heard that Grand Enchanter Fiona is gathering all the rebel mages to her at Andoral's Reach, but the Imperial Highway is swarming with Templars - we knew taking the overland route would be foolish. Most of our Circle wanted to stay, wait for First Enchanter de Fer to return and negotiate safe passage with the Order, but... we would prefer the rebels.

"I... trained at Dairsmuid, Ser Hawke," she said, and sighed, reaching up to rub her temples, "A year ago or so, long before the Annulment. But I met their mages and I trained with their Templars, and I cannot... I could not believe Dairsmuid was so rotten as to deserve its fate."

Brevan passed them, keeping a wary distance from Anders; he gave Hawke a knapsack with great reluctance, jerking his hand back as soon as he was sure Leo had hold of it - like rebellion was contagious. “We headed south, away from scrutiny," he said. "We thought we could pass around the mountain and head north undetected. It looked like a simple enough stretch on the map. We thought we could... hunt a bear or something, keep ourselves fed."

"Dumb of you," Hawke said shortly, upending the knapsack and pushing blocks of cheese in wax paper into the 'cheese' pile.

Anders glanced at Hawke, then back at Brevan. "The only bears out here are the starving ones," he said, "the hungry ones, the desperate ones - the dangerous ones. The others will be hibernating. You had best hope we don't encounter one - the Gamordan Peaks are ruthless enough," he said. "We're just in the foothills now. As we cut north it will get much harder." He looked over at Lisse, who was alone at the edge of the group, trying and failing to listen in while looking like she didn't much care. "Especially with children."

"We know," Harlow said quietly, "But some risks are worth taking."

She had a point. Death by exposure or death by templars; Anders remembered Hawke making a similar choice, Circles or Deep Roads. He had understood then, although his heart had ached in his chest at the idea - mingled with a kind of righteous fury that one so brave and fierce should be reduced to such a cruel choice.

As a Knight-Enchanter, Harlow was clearly the physical powerhouse of the group - but that didn't mean she was the most useful. Of the mages, Anders tallied up eight force mages - including the quarrelsome Brevan, who muttered under his breath after every word Anders said - eleven primal mages, nine elemental mages, and three arcane mages, which at least explained how the group had gotten as far as it had. The arcane mages were adept at group barrier generation, holding shields closely over their peers, and the elemental mages worked well to keep the insides of the shields as warm as they could; they were taking it in turns, but all of them were fairly worn down. 

"No creation mages?" He checked.

"Maybe Lisse?" Harlow shrugged. "However much training a child can have."

Lisse was not a creation mage, Anders was fairly sure. With a great deal of eye-rolling on her behalf, and what Anders felt was a great deal of patient questioning on his, she reluctantly confessed that she had not yet chosen a school to specialise in at all. "I didn't get on well at Ostwick," she admitted. "They said I had to go to Orlais or... or I could choose to be one of _those_ freakish fuckers."

She nodded at one of the Tranquil men, whose name Anders hadn't checked, as she spoke. He turned at her voice, face smooth and unlined, and said, "You are being insulting, Apprentice Lisse."

"Like it matters to you," she said, pulling a face.

"Disharmony in the group could have dire consequences," the Tranquil man said, calm as still water. "I may no longer be capable of offense, but I believe that it would be for the benefit of the group to ask you to apologise."

Lisse made a rude gesture, and Anders gave up on her for the day. This was one of the reasons Irving had never let him take his own apprentices or teach his own classes, back at Kinloch - that and, quite rightfully, the fear that he would sow dissension and rebellion amongst the young Circle mages he tutored. His teenage years had been bad enough, he felt that gave him a pass on handling everybody else's.

"You're good at handling moody teenagers," he checked with Hawke, who had almost finished sorting the food, "Can you speak to Lisse?"

Hawke looked at him like he was daft. "Only _Carver_ ," he said, "That took us fucking _years_ , and a Grey Warden membership."

"Something to keep in mind," Anders muttered, and saw the ghost of a smile pass briefly over Hawke's face; he let his hand drop on Hawke's shoulder, felt the muscle under the fur coat. He had always liked Leo's smiles, rare as hen's teeth as they were. "How are we doing on the food side of things?"

Hawke sighed. "If we can get there in six days," he said, "And if Fang catches three rabbits or similar sized creatures a day - I think we can manage it. They may not have known it but they took good rations with them when they bolted from Montsimmard - salted pork, hard cheese, a lot of nuts. With ours added in to theirs... we'll be hungry but we'll make it."

The next issue was how to arrange the food on the mages. Hawke wanted to hand parcels out to each of them, every person responsible for his or her own food - but the arcane mages were already bone weary from their constant work, and the elemental mages were nearly as ragged. Harlow volunteered to carry their supplies, pointing out that part of her training had been the conversion of mana to physical strength, and it made enough sense that Hawke gave his approval to the idea after only a moment's thought.

He was carrying most of their sleeping gear, despite Anders's protests, and Fang's food. "You're our only healer," he said flatly, adjusting a strap on Anders's smaller, lighter knapsack. "We need you at your best."

"You're our only Hawke," Anders said, trying for charming and hoping for a smile. He managed neither. 

Leo tugged the strap closed, caught his chin in one gloved hand, and said, "Don't do anything foolish."

"I can't promise that," Anders said quietly. This close there was no ignoring the scar bisecting Leo's right eyebrow, or the greys in his stubble, what little of it showed around his scarf; or the damnable lines of his forehead, below the brim of his hat. He leaned forward and Leo stooped down, perfectly understanding his silent request; and they pressed their foreheads together, warmth amongst the cold.

This close, Anders could smell him, the sweat and spice scent of him under the tang of the snow. He smelled like dog, like Fang, still sleeping between them at night, for the heat; and Anders's heart ached at the familiarity of it all. Nothing could warm him the way the simple presence of Leo could. Nothing had ever come close.

It was a distant dragon's roar, echoing down from the mountains, that separated them; the sun was as high in the sky as it was going to get, and there were things that needed doing. There were always things that needed doing. Hawke kissed him on the forehead, little more than a closed-mouth swipe of his lips, and turned away; Anders watched him go and then looked back at the mages who needed them.

Thirty six. They mattered, too. He had known that from the start.

* * *

Hawke had been a good kid, he was reasonably sure. Mostly sure. His father would've knocked him arse over tea-kettle if he hadn't been, and his mother would have had Words on the subject, the way they had for Carver, those times his brother had acted out - which made it all the harder to understand Lisse.

It wasn't her tantrums Hawke struggled with. Those he got. It was hard enough being a teenager without being one on the eve of war between your people and a people specifically trained to kill you. No, it was the constant eye-rolling and sarcastic sighing that annoyed him, and her strangely specific, somewhat bloody-minded questioning.

"When the Chantry exploded, what was it like?" Terrifying. Irreversible. ... Also a little bit arousing, although he kept that one to himself. "Have you ever killed a Templar?" More than he could count. "Was it hard?" Not recently. "When did you get the dog?" Long ago. "Does he kill people too?" Yes, if asked. "What's it like, killing someone?" Final. "Is it true that you and Anders got married?" Not in the eyes of the Chantry, no, but... long ago they had vowed to be with each other until the day they died. _I would rather be on the run with you than safe with anyone else_ , Anders's voice whispered in the back of his mind.

"I've never killed anyone," Lisse said beside him, her breath puffing out in front of her in great clouds of condensation. "But I'm going to have to, aren't I? Lots of Templars."

"Either that or let them kill you," Hawke said. Fang barked in agreement, free-roaming around them; he scowled at his dog. "The fuck you doing here? Go! Hunt!"

Fang barked again, and seemed almost to roll his eyes before loping ahead; inwardly Hawke groaned. Lisse's teenagedom seemed to be catching. 

"I want a mabari one day," Lisse said. "I don't care that they're a Fereldan thing. He seems useful."

"He is," Hawke said. 

"I had a dog growing up in - well, he wasn't _my_ dog, but we... we took turns feeding him." She paused. "I hope people are still feeding him.

"You're from the Ostwick Alienage?" He had to hold out his hand to help her over a fallen tree, taller than her waist; she slapped it away and climbed over it defiantly all by herself.

She perched atop the tree for a moment, glaring at him; her eyes were green as moss. Smaller than Merrill's. Merrill would have said something about that, about the difference between Dalish and city-born elves - something Fenris would have taken umbrage to, most likely, and then Hawke would've had to separate them. "You think because I'm elvhen, I grew up in the Alienage?"

"You weren't?" He raised an eyebrow, hoisting himself up over the tree.

"I was..." She licked her lips, broke her gaze. "Doesn't matter. They stole me. I was six."

"Shitty of 'em," Hawke said.

"I don't..." She hesitated. "D'you think Fiona can help us get back home? She's getting all the mages together. This lot," a dismissive wave of her hand indicated her fellows, "think she's making a new Circle, a better Circle, but I... I don't want that."

Hawke glanced at her sharply. "Where's home, exactly?"

Lisse bit her lower lip, and then said, in a rush, "Clan Verhan. We were - we were passing through the Marches and they _stole_ me. They said the Clan put me out, that they had too many mages, but I think... I think I was just _lost_."

Leo stopped in his tracks. The wind was picking up, and Lisse's wolf's fur mantle suddenly gained new meaning. "You're _Dalish_."

She bristled, the way a teenage girl would bristle. " _Yes_ ," she snapped, "We're _real_. And we don't murder babies or make eldritch sacrifices, we -"

"I know," Hawke interrupted. "I had a friend who was a Keeper's First. Sabrae clan, from Fereldan." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Shit."

Lisse made a small, soft noise, and when Hawke glanced up, she was watching him hungrily. "Are they still in Fereldan? The Sabrae clan? Do you think they'd know - ?"

Leo shrugged. "No idea," he said, "I'm not Dalish. And my friend got kicked out of her clan. But -" he looked around, nobody appeared to be paying attention - "I'll tell you what. If you get to Fiona, if she can't help you find your clan... I'll talk to my friend. See if there's anything she can do. Way she tells it, the Dalish need all the mages they can _get_."

She looked at him with something like awe, and Hawke found himself grinning at her, just a tad - little more than a quirk of the corner of his mouth. It felt good, offering her that much. Her eyes were big and wet at the edges, and she turned away from him, covering her mouth with the back of her hand; Hawke let her go. He wasn't Dalish, but he understood, to some extent. The year he'd spent in Kirkwall, before he'd met Anders and Merrill - terribly alone, aware of his new role among his family as the shame, the social misfit, mother all twisted up with grief for Bethany, for her home, for her dreams and Carver chipping away at the bond between them out of mingled dear and pride - that had been hard.

It was never easy, being the only one of your kind.

Up ahead of them Anders and Harlow were talking - about Montsimmard's Loyalists, last Hawke had heard, and what their Templars were doing; Brevan loitered at the edges of their conversation, listening in intently. Hawke eyed the man with distrust. 

"Serah Hawke," came a voice, and he glanced to his left; Elia was standing beside a fir tree, looking at him expectantly. As she watched she squatted, brushing aside a layer of snow to reveal a tangled snarl of branches - some kind of bush. He'd given her his snowshoes - she was better than he at identifying the herbs whose tips occasionally sprouted through the snow layer, and had already filled a small basket with a finger's width of roots and withered winter-touched leaves - enough to supplement their meagre rations. She had been trying to do that all along, she had said, but the snowshoes made her more "efficient."

"The roots of this plant are highly edible," she said, now, touching the branches carefully with one gloved finger. "Serah Anders has informed me that you are a gifted force mage - your assistance upending the plant would be more efficient."

Lisse did not follow him as he made his way over to the plant; she stuck with the other mages, turning her head over her shoulder as she walked to see what he did. She seemed highly unnerved by the Tranquil. It made sense, given her previous Circle's threat of the brand, but here - in the wild, with nobody else to rely on - it was at best obnoxious.

Elia held the bush by the branch while he gently shook it out of the earth, and once freed, used a sharp steel herbalist's knife to harvest as much of the root system as she could; as she sliced a segment free, she wiped the dirt off in the snow beside her, and after a moment Hawke crouched down next to her and began to help her clean the roots in this way. She said, "Thank you."

Hawke didn't say anything. They worked quickly, and soon the roots - white, soggy, grubby things, about the width of his thumb - were added to her basket. "They must be cooked before they can be eaten," Elia said, as they re-joined the others. "Andreas can handle this task. He is not an alchemist but he has assisted in the kitchens as part of his duties."

Hawke nodded. Lisse was still craning her neck to watch them. "How long have you been branded?"

"Three years," Elia said, and must have registered his surprise. "After the destruction of the Kirkwall Chantry, the Templars suspended our travel privileges and many of our studies. I was working on a project concerning time; I thought that manipulation of the Fade could alter time itself, reduce the growing time for many legume species. It was not a popular research project but I was content. I thought that, if I could find a way to reproduce my work in the form of an easy spell, mages could visit farms and increase food production - I starved often, in my childhood, and wanted there to be enough food. I wanted to eradicate famine entirely."

"They suspended _that_? How was bean growth research a threat to the Chantry?" Hawke couldn't keep back the sneer, although his heart stung; such a spell would have changed things drastically on his childhood farm. 

Elia looked at him - more, Hawke suspected, because she thought she should than because his words had any impact on her. "Research into the nature of time, and its involvement with the Fade, is extremely limited," she said. "I sourced a text from some mages working on the subject from the Circle at Minrathous. It was the contact with Tevinter that led to my work being suspended."

"I see," Hawke said. 

"I did not take it well," Elia said, still in that bland, neutral tone. "I was emotionally unstable. The project had been my life's work. It was meant to help people. I was enraged that the actions of a mage, not of any Circle, in a different city entirely, had led to my work being suspended. I led a protest against the Knight-Commander's decision, and during that protest, I lost my temper. I hit a Templar in the head with a Stone fist, to such a degree that he still suffers headaches to this day, three years later. Tranquility, it was decided, was the best way to avoid further risk."

Hawke stared ahead for a long moment. Anders said something ahead of them, and Harlow nodded eagerly; the sun was setting over the mountains, casting long shadows across the snow. After a while, Hawke said, "You didn't choose the brand, did you."

Elia said, "It took seven men to hold me down. I do not remember the feeling, but I believe I would have been proud." She looked at him, briefly. "You wonder why a Tranquil would side with the rebels against the Chantry. It is logical. If mages are to be free to study - to obey Andraste's guidelines, that magic must serve man - they cannot do so to their fullest extent whilst mortal men who are not mages watch over them and dictate their actions, not while those mortal men can be themselves guided by fear."

There had been a famine once, a few years after they had bought the farm in Lothering. His father, stern as he had been, and the only member of the family possessed of creation magic, had forbidden the use of magic on their crops even then - lest the neighbours notice their farm flourishing. He never had taught either of his mage children healing magic. Too obvious a temptation, he used to say. Sometimes Hawke wondered, even now, if knowing it could have saved Bethany.

"If you could have your magic back," Hawke said, "Would you?"

"Of course," Elia said, neutrally. "I had it for forty five years. I did not fear it. Proper tuition is the key. It is my hope that someday, after we have achieved our freedom to self-govern, we may properly research a stable and lasting cure. I am willing to serve as a test subject." She paused. "It would be the most efficient."

Hawke glanced away, and thought of Karl; of the grief in his voice, the way it had shook. He had been furious, then, with Anders - the mystery blue glow, the fire in his eyes - for not telling the whole story, but mostly with the Chantry, for doing what it did to a good man. Tranquility was the thing of nightmares, Tranquility for convenience more so. Anders had always said so. It was... satisfying to hear that he had been right.

With a splash of snow, Fang crested the nearest ridge, tail a blur of happiness; he had a scrawny winter hare by the neck. Hawke whistled, beckoning him over, and took it from him. "Thanks," he said. "Go get me another one, boy."

Fang barked, annoyed.

"Yes, this one's for you, swear it," Hawke promised, "We need some too. Go on, get."

Fang span a circle, barked again, affectionately head-butted Hawke in the crotch the way that Leo had never managed to train out of him, and then galloped back off over the horizon. Hawke watched him go for a time, then closed his eyes as the wind blew against his face; his heart hurt.

"Serah," Elia said, "I think I see another of the same bush."

Ending famine was a good long-term goal. Maybe it would be cause enough for the world to stop hating mages. But right now, Hawke thought, they had enough to handle keeping themselves for the next week.

* * *

It took them all day to reach the peaks, and another two to climb it. Their job was made more difficult by the dragons, nesting on the mountaintop - Gamordan Stormriders, Hawke called them. To Anders a dragon was a dragon, but Hawke was the one who researched them in his spare time, who had had the library with a whole shelf of draconomist's notes back in Kirkwall, and if _he_ said they were... Stormriders or what have you, then Anders wasn't about to argue.

The food situation held firm. So did the weather, considering the time of year and location, and their magic held strong against the wind. With the addition of their food supplies, survival knowledge, and Anders's healing, the mages seemed to gain new life. Harlow was grateful, and even Brevan, after Anders healed him of frostbite in three of his toes, admitted that they wouldn't have made it half so long.

Which was why it was all the more surprising when things did go wrong.

They were three days into their trip - halfway through their food stores and halfway over the mountains; Anders had the rear of the group with Samiha, the mage who had had his wanted poster in her pocket (who seemed to mind his presence a lot less now herself, after he had lent her energy via his spirit healing - she was one of the arcane mages holding up the weatherproof barrier). Hawke, Fang, and the Tranquil woman Elia had the front; Brevan and Harlow the middle. They were following a deer trail that wound its way across the mountains, a thin path peppered here and there with shale and broken rock, and the sky was clear and grey.

Anders had just turned to converse with Samiha - to ask about her energy levels, about the barrier - when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fang freeze with one paw raised. Hawke noticed, too, and interrupted his conversation to glance down at his dog. 

"Anders?" Samiha said, "What -"

Fang turned, suddenly, on the spot; his hackles were raised, his teeth bared. Hawke grabbed his dagger from his belt without hesitating. Acting on instinct, Anders unsheathed his staff from his back, and pushed through the mages milling between them. The hairs were standing up on the back of his neck. "Hawke," he said.

"I _know_ ," Hawke replied tersely, his eyes darting around their surroundings. His grip on his dagger was white-knuckled. Fang plunged his nose toward the ground, sniffed around; and then his ears flattened.

"What's the matter?" Harlow was coming up behind him, her thumbs hooked around the straps of her knapsack; her dark eyes were bright and alert, focused as a raven's. "What's the dog -"

Fang spun around, and barked; Hawke swore, shoving Elia aside and sprinting toward them; Anders, turning too late, understood why. They had found the source of Fang's caution, the centre of his alarm; it was approaching from behind Harlow at a run, bursting from a cave they hadn't even _noticed_ \- a hundred feet away, ninety, gaining.

The bear was bigger than most horses.

Hawke's lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl to mimic the beast's. Fang barked so loudly snow shivered on the trees. Someone screamed. Anders thought he heard, distantly, the creaking of wings. Harlow turned, too slowly, and Anders felt something in him spark, like a flint - his skin began to light up. The bear was sixty feet away. Its claws were very sharp.

"The _dragon_ ," someone yelled, their voice clear and high, and Anders looked up.

A Stormrider was circling in the distance, wings lazy and wide, and Anders snapped his gaze back down at the bear and thought, _oh no_.

It went for Harlow. Of course it went for Harlow, with its ribs protruding miserably from its sides and all their food on her back; it smashed into her with such force she flew backward and cracked into the rock, neck lolling at a terrible angle; someone - maybe Samiha - screamed, high and narrow - and Hawke threw lightning at the beast just a second too late. Anders, already moving, seized his hand and forced it downward; the bolt caught the bear in the face and it _shrieked_ , rearing up on its hind legs, paws to its eyes - in the distance the dragon's wingtips wavered -

It turned its head. Anders yelled, "Dragon! _Get moving!_ "

"Harlow!" Brevan cried, trying to lunge past him; she was limp against the rock where she had fallen. Anders seized the man by the collar of his robes, aware he was glowing blue, and shoved him away; caught him again when he came back for another attempt.

The bear lowered one paw. Its teeth were bared. Hawke had grabbed the apprentice, Lisse, by the scruff of her neck and was half pushing her, half pulling her along the trail; the Stormrider beat its wings once, angling toward them. Anders shoved Brevan backward. "She's dead! _Move_!" 

He looked at Anders once, pale with shock; and then Samiha, running past him, grabbed his hand. The rest of the mages sprinted after Hawke and Lisse, pouring down the mountain path, away from the bear and Harlow - Anders pulled his belt knife free and ran to her, landing on his knees with a rough, jarring impact, and began to hack at the straps of her knapsack. So much food in it -

"Anders," it was Elia, the Tranquil woman. She was standing behind him, calm, her little herbalist's knife in one hand. "We don't have time."

"Our _food_ ," Anders said -

"The bear is recovering," Elia said, as if she were making small talk about the weather. "The dragon will be upon it soon. We have to leave - now."

His knife hadn't made more than a minor notch in the hardened leather. Swearing bitterly, Anders grabbed Harlow's belt-knife from its sheath, and stumbled awkwardly to his feet; then he ran, Elia close behind him, as the dragon swept over them all and its shadow fell over them like a shroud.

The lightning that burst from its mouth smelled like ozone. The bear screamed, high-pitched and wounded, a terrible noise Anders felt in the pit of his chest; he and Elia did not slow down, vaulting roots and scrambling over rocky ridges, the other mages visible ahead of them, and when the dragon landed - up above, on the peak where the party had just stood - it knocked loose a small avalanche of shale that bounced and rattled down the mountainside. A pebble whipped past his cheek, and another struck Elia in the hip - she stumbled, but did not fall, and did not stop.

Anders, Harlow's knife clutched tight in one hand, did the same.

They ran until they reached a small plateau, sheltered by some scrubby winter gorse trees. The other mages were gathered there, panting for breath. Anders put his hands on his knees and bent over, sucking in deep, steadying lungfuls of air. Brevan was slumped on his knees next to Samiha, his eyes wide and stunned; Hawke was bent over, checking each of Fang's paws at a time for lacerations from the run; Lisse was staring up the mountainside, the whites of her eyes huge in her face. "Is it going to follow us?" she asked.

"No," Anders said, "The bear is enough to keep it busy." He pinched the bridge of his nose, breathing in deeply, and then shook himself off. "Brevan?" No response. "Brevan? _Brevan_?"

On the third repetition of his name, the man looked up. His pupils were enormous. Anders, schooling his tone, said, "I'm sorry about Harlow. Is everybody else here?"

"W-why would I know that?" Brevan's voice was weak and wavering. "That thing, it was so fast..."

"It's dead now," Anders said, with some sympathy. "I'm sorry. That's how the world works. I need you to be in charge for now - can you make sure everyone's here?" When Brevan stared at him, mute shock, he added, "Please?"

"I - fine. Yes. Yes." Brevan climbed slowly to his feet. "Fine. I... one, two, three, four -"

Anders drew abreast with Hawke, who just looked at him, and in Leo's eyes he saw the same concerns he had. Hawke was holding a piece of scrap cloth against Fang's right hind paw, and when Anders kneeled next to them, Leo said, "We need to get off this fucking mountain today or tomorrow, no later."

"I know," Anders said. "Fang, can I have your paw? Thank you." It was a minor laceration, and a quick burst of healing magic fixed it quickly; Fang licked his face in gratitude and stepped away, shaking himself off. Leo breathed out slow and deep, and Anders took his hand, squeezed it. Hawke squeezed back. They shared a long look, six years of being together and nine years of knowing one another an advantage; and then Anders let go and pushed himself back onto his feet.

"Does anybody need healing?" Anders called.

The mages mostly had shock, a few bumps and cuts, and a sprained ankle going down the mountainside; Lisse had a scratch on her cheek bleeding freely from a stray pebble. Anders had just finished healing it away when Brevan materialised at his elbow. "Elia is missing," he said.

"What?" Anders's brows furrowed. "She was with me all the way down the mountain," he said, "Where can she have - "

Hawke cleared his throat and nodded back up the path; picking her way down the trail, hard to spot in her plain clothes and moving with meticulous precision, Elia arrived in their midst. "Where were you?" Brevan demanded; she met his gaze with her usual lack of expression.

"I wanted to see if anything could be salvaged of the food supplies Harlow was carrying," she said. "Regrettably, the dragon appears to be consuming the bear slowly, and though I was able to catch a glimpse of the scene without it noticing, I do not believe I could travel any closer to Harlow's knapsack. Furthermore, judging by the speed of consumption, I do not believe the dragon will move from the mountaintop until at least tomorrow."

Hawke shook his head. "She was hungry," he said. "Hungry as the bear. She's not going anywhere in case another dragon steals her kill."

"Wonderful," said Brevan, succinctly. 

"It is my recommendation that we pool our resources again," Elia said carefully, "And adjust our plan for the rest of the descent." After a small pause, she added in her flat monotone, "I am very sorry for the loss of Harlow."

Anders sighed. Brevan passed a hand over his face. Hawke was already turning away, no doubt to begin checking and re-dividing their food; Anders watched him do so and made his way over to the edge of the plateau, staring down at the mountainside. It looked deceptively closer to the ground than it was.

"Anders," Brevan said behind him; when he turned, the man was looking at him, pale but alert. "... Thank you."

"For...?"

"For getting me off that mountaintop." Brevan's face twisted. "I would have stayed."

"Oh." Anders paused to process this. "I'm sorry for your loss. I didn't know her long, but she seemed... a good person. Were you close?"

"We were apprentices together," Brevan said. He came to stand beside Anders, his shoulders hunched. "Friends. Nothing more. I prefer the company of... well, other men. "But I liked her, and she liked me, and we helped each other settle in, back in the apprentice dorms. You know what that's like - or... I assume you do. Chantry said you were a Circle mage, before you... snuck your way into the Grey Wardens."

Anders thought briefly of Karl, and turned back to the view; he touched his bicep with his other hand, curling his fingers loosely around the muscle. "I was," he said. "A Circle mage. Despite my best efforts. I escaped seven times, you know; the eighth time the Hero of Fereldan conscripted me in person, no sneaking required."

Brevan glanced at him sharply. "Really? The way they tell it, there was some... shady affair going on."

"Some Templars died to Darkspawn," Anders said. "I couldn't prove that it had been Darkspawn, and the Chantry wasn't prepared to investigate. Warden-Commander conscripted me to put an end to it, but you know the Chantry... couldn't let it go. I think I offended them by finally managing to get free, you know."

"I can imagine," Brevan said. He cleared his throat. "You know, Anders, about Kirkwall..."

Ah. There it was. Anders glanced at him, in profile; his hands were folded in front of him, but Anders could see the way his wrists shivered with tension. "Yes," he said. "I killed those people. Go ahead. Ask me whatever you want."

"Was there another way?" Brevan sounded... lost.

"No," Anders said. "The Templars were going to kill all the mages there. They would have lied, after the fact. I knew I needed to tip Meredith's hand, to make her go in publically and start swinging, so people would know that she had no permission to do it. That she did it because of me, a non-Circle mage." He paused. "And so that the Gallows mages would at least get the chance to fight for their lives. I knew their chance was slim. I just calculated that it was less slim than an organized, planned annulment would have been."

There was silence for a time as Brevan digested this. After a moment he said, "You didn't do it out of rage? Or... hate?"

Anders shook his head. "Ask Hawke," he said, "He was there. I did hate the Templars. I do. But if hatred was what motivated me, I would have attacked them directly. Not the people of Kirkwall.

"I know what I did had consequences," Anders said, "And I know mages are feeling them. Are still feeling them. I regret that people had to die, but I'd do it again. I'd do it all again."

Brevan breathed out slowly. "The way the Chantry talked about you - like a mad dog, a cackling abomination who just sought death and destruction for his own ends, I... You're not what I expected," he said, carefully.

"You're not the first to say so." Anders turned his head and looked at him then, full-on; Brevan met his gaze steadily, unblinking. "All I want is for mages to have a chance," he said. "For us to have a _choice_. That's all."

Brevan smiled, a small, thin quirk of his lips. "The Chantry have never really been honest with us about anything, have they?" he said. "Never really..." He trailed off, and tipped his head back, looking up at the night sky; the circles under his eyes were dark smudged. "Maybe you're not what they say. Maybe, when... _if_ we meet up with Fiona and her people...

"Maybe there's a place there for you, too. Maybe not as Anders, or Hawke, but... new yous."

Anders swallowed. There was a rock in his throat, all of a sudden, hard and solid. "I... I think we would like that," he said, cautiously. "Hawke and I. I think we would like that very much."

From behind them, someone cleared their throat; they both turned around to see Samiha, holding a knapsack. "Hawke's done divvying the food up," she said. "He thinks we've got enough to last us a day, day and a half.

"That long?" Anders accepted the knapsack when she passed it to him, and then turned, looking down the mountainside again; in this new light, it looked almost... welcoming.

"He thinks we should make camp now, here, since we've got the flat ground," Samiha said, "Then start out tomorrow."

"I think we can do this," Anders said to Hawke that evening, shucking off his boots. Fang watched him sleepily from the dog's customary place in the centre of their bedroll; Hawke, on the other side of the dog - shaving by the reflection of his staff blade, using the red-ribbon dagger Sebastian had given him for his nameday what felt like a lifetime ago - glanced up at him. "I think we can deliver these mages safely to their comrades."

"Counting chickens," Hawke said, plunging the dagger back into its bowl of melted ice. He turned his head, pulling a face at his impromptu mirror; he still had a considerable patch of stubble along the shadow of his jaw. Anders sighed, kicking off his remaining boot, and crawled across their bedroll, nudging Fang out of the way without subtlety to reach Hawke.

"Here," he said, "Let me." When Hawke passed him the dagger - the ribbon-wrapped hilt snug in the hollow of his palm, the blade sharp and true - he touched Hawke's chin to angle his face, and gently began to finish the job; Hawke's eyes flicked toward him and back again.

"When we cross the mountains," Hawke said, "What's the plan?"

Scrape, scrape. Anders wiped some more black, bristly hair from the blade onto the lip of the bowl. "They need to get to Andoral's Reach," he said. "They need to join their fellows. That's the plan. After that... Brevan thinks there might be space for us there."

Hawke's eyebrow quirked. "After Kirkwall?"

"Even after Kirkwall." The dagger rasped over the harsh planes of Leo's jawbone.

"You would be... happy with that?" Hawke sounded uncertain; he turned his face obediently under Anders's direction. "Mingling with the rebel mages? Setting up a new Circle?"

Anders sighed. "Yes," he said, "No. Maybe. I'm not sure, love. This - even tonight, awful as it was - has felt... satisfying. Better than hiding in safe house after safe house. I know you want to keep us safe, but I still think there's a place for us, in this revolution." He tipped Hawke's chin up, started in on his throat. "I don't think we're finished."

Hawke grunted. "You heard them, Anders. Madman. Murderer. Child killer. I know it doesn't matter to you -"

"Of course it matters!" Anders said, indignantly; blue flicker-flashed across his hands and away again, a pulse following the clenching of his heart. Hawke didn't even flinch. "I know that - for the sake of the revolution, we can't be on the front lines. That Fiona can't endorse that. Us. I know that, I knew it before I ever asked you for aid building that device - but we can't just _stop_."

Hawke's nostrils flared as he took in one deep breath. " _You_ can't," he said, and his voice was rough and jagged. "I know."

Anders rose slowly to his feet, dagger in hand; Hawke watched him out of the corner of his eye. "Yes," he said, and then, softer, "I'm sorry."

"You're not fully human anymore," Hawke said. "I knew that. You need..." _A purpose_ , Anders thought, _A goal. A function._ "You need more than just your life to own, to live - I knew that going into this. I just..."

 _Here it comes_ , Anders thought. His chest ached. He stared down at the dagger in his hand, his heart in his throat, and swallowed; he had thought he had prepared for this moment - prepared for _months_ , but now that it was here... It was harder than he thought to sit, and to wait for Hawke to say that he was done, giving up, walking away. There would be other mages, other people to save. But none of them were _Leo Hawke_ , and oh, it ached.

Hawke said, "I love you," and Anders thought, _I know, but -_

The _but_ never came. Leo stared down at his hands, and then sighed, and tipped his head back. "Get the other side for me, if you can," he said. "This shaving soap is itchy as fuck."

Anders blinked, but that seemed to be all. The tension oozed down his gullet, set up home in his belly; it would be another day, then, the blow; arrive unexpected at another time. Maker, he was getting tired of waiting for it.

He wasn't human any more. He had known this, even as he prepared to destroy the Chantry - had known there was no spotting the edges between himself and Justice, if there even were any; that Hawke had fallen in love with a man and surely could not love the spirit. That he loved Hawke, but would not, _could_ not, put that love above the injustice of the mages, not in his heart of hearts. That Hawke might say he understood, might claim to want to flee Kirkwall with him, to aid him in the rebellion - but would soon fall out of love with the realities of their lives.

They'd had three years. It might be selfish, but Anders would take any minute further Hawke wanted to give him. "Keep your head up," he said, and bent to finish the job. 

"Always do," said Hawke.

* * *

The rest of their trip down the mountainside was uneventful. They made it in just under a day and a half, with scraps of food to spare, and at Hawke's suggestion and Brevan's agreement, found a sheltered location at the foot of the mountain to establish camp, and try to replenish their food stores.

"We need rest," Hawke said, "Arcane mages are _this_ close to mana imbalance. Fire mages aren't much better. If they pass out on the road -"

"We understand," Brevan said. Two of the arcane mages were sleeping now in Hawke's on tent, in his sleeping roll; the mages had been relying on their barrier spells since long before Hawke and Anders had joined them. Anybody who could be spared was out foraging, a task made infinitely more complicated by the fact that most of them had no idea how; Elia had more than seven mages with her as she searched for edible roots and berries, attempting to show them what could and couldn't be eaten.

Anders had taken Fang and gone looking for game. Hawke had watched him go without argument, his heart pulsing in his chest; it felt, day by day, that Anders was pulling away from him - tiring of him, perhaps. It hurt. He had already said farewell to most of his family; his friends were scattered throughout Thedas, and his brother was miles and miles away, with his new family. Anders was... the most important thing he had. He wishes he was better with words, better at expressing it.

With so many mages sleeping or working, Hawke had decided to use the time to fortify the camp. The force mages had proven useful here; at his direction they had dug long trenches along the base site and were working on toppling some trees to use as stakes. The mages - exhausted, hungry and surly - clearly thought it was a lot of work for very little payoff, but life had done enough to Hawke that he thought it well worth the caution.

In the end, the universe did not wait very long to validate him. Anders returned from his excursion with Fang but without game, and wasted no time before informing them that a large squadron of Templars had dug in across the pass.

"What?" Brevan's voice was faint, wavering; he looked like he might pass out.

Anders was grim and determined. "Here," he said, and drew in the dirt with a stick. "If we're here - at the foothills of the northern side of this mountain, here - the Templars are waiting _here_."

The mages crowded around his drawing, examining it in mute horror. The Rivaini woman - Nkeiru - said, "Can't we just go around it?"

"Not easily," Andreas replied in his flat voice. He held out a hand for the stick, which Anders passed over to him. "There is a way out on the northern end of the pass, _here_ , but it would involve several more days of travel. I do not believe we have the rations to attempt such a voyage."

"We would die," Elia said.

Brevan swore, colourfully, and glared down at the drawing. "I know you said the Templars were after us, but that was - this is - Oh, those bastards."

"We don't have enough food to outlast them, we don't have enough food to go around them, and we don't have enough people to face them directly," Anders said. He glanced around at their site, at the sharpened stakes Hawke had half-placed into the ditches. "The only thing we can do is lure them here and fight them on ground of our choosing."

Hawke crossed his arms. "Did they have archers? Cavalry? How many were there?"

"Somewhere between forty and fifty," Anders said, "Spread between here and here. They had a supply cart with them. I saw two squadrons in leather armour - could be their archers, could be your regular Templar mage-hunter's brigade."

"If they have hunters - scouts - then we haven't long before they find us," Samiha said, paling as the implications set in; this caused a minor panic, leading to the waste of several minutes as Elia, Hawke and Anders attempted to keep calm. 

"We need to sting them in the flank," Brevan said, frowning intently at the row of little dirt x's Anders had drawn. "Antagonize them enough to stir them from their foxholes and have them come to us."

Hawke snorted. "Ambush the ambushers?"

"Something like that." Brevan looked quickly from mage to mage. "Any suggestions?"

After a moment of forceful silence, Lisse said, "Burn the supply cart." When they looked at her in surprise, she shrugged. "It's got to have their food in it, right? They're sitting there all smug, eating as they like, knowing we're going hungry? Burn it _down_. Then the fucking bucketheads are going to have to move... _somewhere_ , right?"

"We're starving, too," Samiha said. "Shouldn't we just capture it?"

Leo glanced down at the map. "Too hard," he decided, after a moment's study. "It's right in the middle of them. If we set up a distraction - _here_ \- and send in an primal mage or two, _here_ \- couple chain -lightnings should do it."

Anders grinned; the edges of his eyes crinkled. Leo was immediately wary of that look. "I've been told that I am very distracting," he said, breezily. "If I make a commotion - "

"No," Hawke said.

"Leo." Normally Anders's frown was too much for Hawke, who hated it when Anders was unhappy; but not today.

"No," he said, and then, with the best poker face he could muster, added, "You're our only healer. You stay here."

"He's got a point," Lisse said, eagerly. "If we -"

"You're staying here too," Hawke told her. "Higher up in the mountains if you have to." He glanced at Anders. "Sit on her, if needed."

Anders's face was cold, expressive eyes narrowed; his lip was pulled up in a sneer. He had never had a good Wicked Grace face. "You can't -"

"Yes," said Hawke, "I can. We've only got one chance to surprise them, and one chance to bleed them enough to run into our trap - if it goes wrong, we're going to need healing. Shitloads of it." He glanced around at the other mages, most of whom looked some degree of worried, or scared; a few, however, looked grim. "We'll go when the sun goes down. Brevan. Pick some people, no more than eight, plus two primal mages."

"I'm going," said Brevan. He straightened from Anders's map, looking briefly around the circle at the mages under his nominal leadership, and then began gesturing. "You. You. You. You and you, you're the ones burning the supply cart - you, you, you and you - you're with Hawke and I. Anyone not picked - speak to Elia, find out what this camp needs for its defence."

Those not selected began to disperse. Lisse sighed heavily. Elia, whose lack of magic excluded her from the gathering, silently fished a whetstone out of her pocket and moved back to sharpen her dagger. Anders folded his arms over his chest, glaring icily at Leo, who ignored him the best he could manage.

They ate the last of their rations in the camp site together, as a group - all of them except for Anders, who sat on the opposite side of the fire from Hawke, sipping water from his cup and staring moodily into the flames. Hawke spent the time sharpening his staff blade on a whetstone, more for something to occupy his hands with than anything else. The stakes had gone up, a nice little wall holding out the darkness, and they had several sentries posted - including Fang, out on patrol somewhere in the gloom, Elia at his side.

Lisse materialised at his elbow shortly after dinner, holding a steaming mug. "For you," she said. "Here."

"Didn't know we had tea," Hawke said, taking it, and sniffed the contents. "... Is this just melted snow?"

"Fancy term for that is _water_ ," Lisse said, looking smug. Hawke snorted and took a sip of his melted snow; she inched closer.

"What," Hawke said, after several long seconds of her staring at him had been and gone.

"How old were you," Lisse said, "When you killed your first Templar?"

Hawke looked at her for a while over the top of his mug. Her face was nothing but eager, her green eyes alert. "I don't know," he said, after a pause. "Didn't exactly keep a record. Not that old. He found out about Bethany, my sister, so I... I did what needed to be done."

"Was it hard?"

He shook his head. "I helped my dad butcher our chickens for supper," he said. "Like that, on a larger scale. Knife went in just the same. Why'd you ask?"

"If they get past you -" Lisse twitched aside her fine wolf's fur. There was a dagger sheathed at her side, under her arm; the scabbard was oiled and shiny. It looked like something she had held onto for a long time. "I'm ready," she said.

Hawke swirled his cup idly, and thought about what he should say. His mother would have been horrified, his father cold and barbed; Varric would have made a joke of it that ended in her surrendering her knife. Aveline would have scolded her. He wasn't these people. He said, "Stick them first, here." He lay his hand flat on his belly. "Keep sticking them until they stop moving. Don't stop. Get them first, so they can't get you."

She grinned, green eyes crinkling. "That was the plan," she said, happily. Briefly Hawke thought of Fiona's people, north of here; he wondered if they were giving children the same advice there. Probably not. He wasn't cut out to be a parent. "So... What's going on with you and Mister Blue-Eyed Boom?" She jerked her head across the campfire, and Hawke followed her gaze to Anders, still scowling into the flames.

"Complicated," he said.

"Really?" Her mouth twisted. "Or are you just saying that because it sounds good?"

Hawke's mouth moved despite itself, soft at the edges. Through the fire the dark circles under Anders's eyes looked only bigger; Hawke wanted to smooth them away, and wished he knew how to bridge that gap. He said, "I think... I think he thinks I'm going to leave him. I think he thinks I'm bored of... this. I think he's worried that he's too... much, that his focus is too much, his intensity is too much." He paused. "It's not. But I don't know how to say that in a way he would understand."

Lisse was looking at him like he was speaking Qunlat. Abruptly he remembered that she was only fourteen, and Dalish-born, Circle-reared beside. "Right," she said, sounding unconvinced.

"Said it was complicated, brat," Leo said. He finished his cup of melted snow and passed it back to her. "We're leaving soon. Get that cleared up, and - Lisse?"

"Yeah?" She was halfway to her feet.

"I meant it about you steering clear of this mess," he said. "If you want to find your Clan - any Clan - again, listen to what I tell you and stay out of the fighting."

She pulled possibly the best eyeroll yet. "As you command, _Knight-Commander_ ," she said, in a sarcastic, lower-octave mimicry of his voice. Hawke snorted, and shooed her away; she made a rude gesture at him with each finger, which made him smile into the fire.

He was still holding onto that smile ten minutes later, as Brevan introduced him briefly to the other members of the attack teams. He sent the primal mages to the other side of the pass, to the cover provided by the gorse trees there; and, with as much stealth as they could muster, they began to head along the mountainside pass to their destination.

There were, indeed, close to fifty Templars camped at the head of the pass. They had even posted sentries - but the sentries had likely not been expecting an assault by a squad of force mages, let alone one with an apostate's training and an apostate's tactical mindset, as Leo had been; one by one the sentries were quietly but efficiently removed, plucked from their feet or silenced by means of a hard, magic-powered impact to their solar plexuses, knocking the air out of them and keeping them from calling for help. The group crept closer and closer to the Templar site as one, together, and when they were about twenty feet away crouched down in the scrublands for a closer look. Against the white of the snow, their lighter-coloured furs and shabby robes were almost as good as black in shadow.

Of the fifty or so Templars gathered in the valley, only around twenty or do were the good old-fashioned knight-in-plate kind. There were a handful of tents set up behind small, spike-filled trenches, including one with a full sword of mercy banner staked outside it; Brevan, who understood Templar insignias and symbols better than Hawke did, indicated this was a Knight-Lieutenant's banner, and likely the group's leader. Of the Lieutenant himself, they saw no sign, and surmised shortly that he must be in the tent.

The supply cart was exactly where Anders had thought it would be, on the other side of the pass; guarded by Templars, with trenches dug around it in three directions, they likely imagined it safe. Hawke closed his eyes and reached out toward it with his senses, but detected only a handful of wards on it - protection runes warding it from magical fire, but nothing shielding it from normal fires started by burning contents.

Better and better.

He waited until he was sure the two primal mages were in position, on the other side of the pass, and then wriggled forward a good ten feet through the shrubbery; the other mages did the same. They were flanking the group now, looking down upon a small band of around ten templars or so and the Knight-Lieutenant's tent. 

Now was the time. Meticulously Hawke began to gather the threads of his magic, pulling them together into an impression of pressure, and heart-bursts, and light; of the tingling sensation in his fingertips, the ozone smell of the Stormrider's breath, the steady pulse in his head. When he thought he had it he nudged Brevan, who swallowed, clasped his hands together briefly in prayer, and made one small hand gesture, and it had begun.

Brevan's force magic swept around the ten card-playing Templars, dragging them off their feet and into an undignified heap in the middle of their table with various yelps and squeals; as their fellows looked over - some reaching for swords, even fewer standing up - Hawke unleashed his spell. The first lightning bolt struck the stunned group dead-on, flickering across all their shiny belt buckles and dagger-hilts and boot fastenings; the second and third tongued over the Knight-Lieutenant's tent, and the silk fabric began to smoulder almost immediately. The lightning storm raged on, tongues of white light licking out indiscriminately; eventually a forward-thinking Templar, fresh on lyrium and smart for it, slapped a Silence down over the area - but Hawke already had his next spell prepared.

Some templars charged the area, others began to bunch up, shields raised and looking around for unseen attackers; it didn't matter. Hawke and the other mages struck - more Tempest spells, Fists of the Maker sweeping charging Knights off their feet, Telekinetic Bursts throwing groups of archers around - and in the midst of the chaos lightning licked over the supply cart, again and again, and finally it burst into scarlet flames a full six foot high. The Knight-Lieutenant's tent was a smoking mess, the victim of a well-timed Firestorm spell from Hawke. 

Hawke had killed Templars before, but it never got old - watching his childhood bogeymen run about, burning, screaming - reminding him that they were not invulnerable, were just _men_ no harder or more impossible to kill than any other - that was almost cathartic. These men obviously hadn't been prepared for an organised assault. They had come, in overwhelming numbers, intending to polish off a number of confused, overwhelmed 'robes' weakened substantially by the long overland trip from Montsimmard - and in another life, they would have done so with no problems.

Leo remembered the weak camp they had first found, with its single lone sentry too close to the fire to even retain decent night vision. These Templars would never have broken a sweat. Now the boot was on the other foot, and Hawke was not inclined to relent. He was just about to launch another Firestorm at a cluster of knights huddling by one of the other tents when Brevan grabbed his sleeve. "Look," the man hissed, "They have their hands up - they're surrendering!"

"And?" said Hawke, but Brevan was already rising to his feet. "Brevan!"

It was too late. The knights had already noticed him. Hands up, they turned toward him, faces hopeful and expectant; the leader carefully bent down and lay his sword and shield on the ground, and then took off his helmet. He had a boyish face, with pale eyes and a mop of dark brown hair, curling to his flushed and sweaty forehead. "Monsieur," he called, his voice thin and wavering, "Monsieur, do you lead this band of mages?"

Brevan nodded assent, a short sharp gesture. The Templar knelt on the floor, his hands up, and said, "We surrender, Monsieur - you have beaten us."

His fellows behind him were doing the same. Hawke said, "Shit."

Of course Brevan would insist on bringing the surrendered Templars back to camp, although he was smart enough to listen to Hawke and have them discard their armour and arms first. Dressed in plain tunics and trews - and winter jackets - there were twenty seven Templars to account for, mostly men; Brevan found some rope in amongst the supply crates they hadn't set fire to during the assault and tied their hands behind their backs, and then marched them back to the camp like a triumphant emperor. Hawke skulked behind him, teeth grinding loud enough to be heard in Val Royeux. 

"These men and women of the order surrendered to us during the battle," Brevan told the other mages, when he had them all gathered at the camp so their Templar prisoners could see exactly how few in number they were. "We will ransom them back to their families unharmed and, in so doing, prove that there is a way other than war - that things do not have to come down to _violence_ and _death_ and _murder_."

Anders, who had ducked out of their tent upon his return, stared at the templars in horror and then at Hawke, who scowled at him and shrugged. Elia, her arms folded lightly across her chest, said with absolutely no excitement whatsoever, "Congratulations, Ser. Were we able to retrieve anything in the way of food?"

"There's a few unburned supply crates back at their ambush site," Brevan told her. "Take a few mages there and make a tally."

She nodded agreement and jerked her chin at Samiha, Andreas and Nkeiru, the latter of whom gave the line of captive Templars a very wide and very cautious berth as she squeezed out of the campsite and through the stakes. Hawke said, "Where are they sleeping?"

"We'll dig them a hollow," Brevan decided. He grinned at Hawke triumphantly. "Templars have to be worth something. I'd bet most of these are third children from some very nice families."

Anders, coming up beside Hawke, said, "Only if those families deliver more than mere promises. How are we going to warm them? Feed them? Keep a constant watch over them? Brevan..."

"What would you have me do, kill surrendering enemies?" Brevan's face was flushed. "We're _better_ than that. Better than them. We have to be." He paused. "Otherwise, what in the void was all of this _for_?"

"So they wouldn't murder us while we slept, mostly," Anders said. He eyed the Templars with disgust, and caught Hawke's eye; they shared a moment of silent communication.

"We are mages of the Circle of Magi," Brevan decided. "We don't murder surrendering enemies. That would be a line too barbaric to come back from. Hawke - Charles, Ankara - help me dig a pit for the prisoners."

Hawke looked from him to Anders, whose mouth was twisted in a way he hadn't seen for a long time, and felt a bolt of understanding punch through him with all the force of Bianca. "Anders," he said, in a low, fierce voice. "Anders -"

Anders glanced at him once, briefly, and then away again; and then he turned on his feel and walked off, and - even clad as he was in grey winter furs, plain and unremarkable - for a moment Hawke thought he saw a familiar mantle around his shoulders, the sun catching glossy and irridescent from a hundred black feathers.

Then he blinked, and Anders was gone, and the light was as normal. Brevan whistled to get his attention, and the templars, bound as they were, watched him too carefully as he made his way over to the pit.

Elia and the others returned just as they were finishing the pit, carrying with them the last of the boxes; Samiha stacked the crate with its sword of mercy seal up next to Hawke's tent and said, "Elia's almost finished with the counting, Brevan."

"Good," said Brevan, shoving his dirt-covered and sweat-stained hair out of his face. "Help me up, Hawke?"

It took a leg boost and some force magic to climb out of the pit for each of them; it was deeper by far than anything two non-mages could have dug in a week. The Templars - currently tied to uprooted and repurposed log stakes for the night, until the pit was finished - gloomily watched as they made their way past to the centre of the campsite, where Elia sat by the fire with a stick of chalk and a small square of paper. She looked up when they approached.

"The Knights of the Templar Order brought with them a good deal of food," she said, "Most of which, unfortunately, we burned. We have recovered a decent amount in travel and field rations, mostly from the bodies of those slain by the ambush party."

"Do we have enough to reach Andoral's Reach?" asked Samiha.

Elia paused. "The mathematician's answer is: yes," she said. "Based on my estimates of terrain type and estimated speed, we should have enough food, with careful rationing, to arrive safely at Andoral's Reach within the next fortnight."

Anders, who was standing quietly at the entrance to their tent, said, "All of us?"

"Not our guests," Elia said. She looked briefly down at her calculations. "By my workings, if we factor in our prisoner's food requirements, not to mention the reduction in our average walking speed due to heightened security, we have enough food to last us four days."

This caused a stir. "Four days?" Brevan sounded disbelieving. "Fourteen days for us, four - how can twenty nine templars consume ten days worth of food so quickly?"

"The lyrium," Anders said. Elia nodded silent agreement. "They're adult fighting men and women with high energy requirements to begin with. Add in the lyrium and they'll burn through the food fast."

"Which is another factor in itself," Elia agreed. "We were only able to salvage twenty two lyrium kits from their supplies. It appears the majority of their spares were located on the cart. There is, simply put, not enough lyrium to go around."

"I've seen lyrium withdrawal symptoms in Templars before," said the woman with the Antivan accent, pale. "It's not a kindness."

Brevan glanced at their captives, on the other side of the campsite and hopefully out of earshot range. "We can't... is there another village nearby we could hole up in? A Chantry we could ransom them to?"

Elia glanced at Anders, who scowled. "What would be the point?" he said. "Toting them across the country - slowing us down..."

"No," said Brevan, quickly. "They _surrendered_."

Anders's mouth thinned. Leo thought, _we are the only ones who know that_.

"Conques," Elia said, into the awkward silence. "There is a village called Conques at the end of the pass. It is, I believe, a shade closer to the Imperial Highway than we wished to travel. But it had a Chantry. We retrieved the Knight-Lieutenant's dispatch papers amongst the supplies; they mention that he is authorised to stop there for resupply."

"How far away is this village?" Samiha wanted to know. "Will it put us far out of our way?"

"A sevenday," Elia said.

"It's completely the wrong direction," Anders said flatly. "Back south and east, toward the Highway - it would involve nearly walking around the entire mountain range we _just_ crossed."

Brevan looked at his hands. "Seven days," he said, "And only enough food for four..."

Anders said, "You don't owe Templars safe passage, Brevan. They tried to kill you."

"But they aren't anymore." Brevan lifted his head, looked Anders straight in the eye. "You had no other choice. I do. We'll take the Templars to Conques, and trade them to their Chantry for supplies. From there we can head north to Andoral's Reach."

"What if Conques is a trap?" Anders argued. "The Templars broke from the Chantry too. What if the Chantry is authorized to resupply because the town itself is under Templar command?"

Brevan sighed, and looked at Anders with something almost like pity; it made Leo's hackles rise. "We cannot live our lives with nothing but paranoia," he said. "We'll take them to Conques. If it is a trap, we will come to... other arrangements."

"After starving for three days to get them there," Anders muttered. 

"We'll sleep on it," Brevan promised. "For now, that is all we can do. Samiha, Herosa - first watch. Hawke, Elia - second."

The mages dispersed then, talking to each other in low voices; Hawke rose to his feet and crossed the campsite to stand by Anders, who glanced at him briefly and then looked away. He said, "I made a decision once. I may make another soon. I love you, Hawke."

"Yeah," Hawke said. "I know. Come on. Let's get some shut-eye before my watch begins." 

Neither of them slept well, of course; Anders was stiff and unyielding on the other side of Fang, staring straight up ahead at the tent roof. Leo lay quietly on his own side of the bedroll, feeling the whisper of Fang's fur against his back, hearing the rhythmic snoring of his dog, and all he could think about was the lyrium-filled warehouse, the block of cheese divided and the fire in Anders's eyes, burning brightly even as his own seemed to have banked out.

Once he had slaughtered Templars on the Wounded Coast on nothing more than a blood mage's lover's request. Once he had stood in Anders's clinic with Alrik's blood on his face and kissed him for the first time, and he had tasted the salt between their parted lips. Once Anders had been slipping away from him, closing himself off to try and make it hurt less for _Hawke_ , and he had stood there bold as brass and said, _I'm not expecting this to end with anything less than overthrowing the Templars_. Once he had been a partner for Anders, someone who burned as hot and bright as he did.

That Hawke had been fire and strength, and a kind of redness, redness to the bone; and somewhere in between Meredith's death and his makeshift family scattering to the breeze, that fire had burned itself out. _You'll be all alone_ , his mother had whispered, smearing blood all over his face and with her breath smelling like lillies; and he had felt her in his arms and marvelled, even through the horror, at how little she weighed.

Now she was gone, beyond his reach; father and Bethany with her. And the others - the others he had loved, Isabela and Fenris and Aveline and Merrill, Carver and Bodahn and Sandal and oh, Varric, Varric beyond all others - they were scattered. Scattered so far away. 

All he had left was in that tent, the snoring of the dog and the faint sound of Anders's teeth grinding the way they always did when he was thinking too hard, and Hawke took those sounds in and held them in his breast and felt something small and familiar kindle there, a flame tiny and old. _Fugitives together_ , he thought, and in the dark he closed his eyes and breathed in, slow and deep.

When Elia came to collect him for their shift, he could feel the warmth of the flame all the way through, down to the tips of his fingers; and he knew what he had to do. Anders didn't watch him go. When Hawke touched him, lightly, on the shoulder, he could feel the warmth of him, burning like a furnace; he was wound so tightly it was a miracle it was only his teeth that were grinding. 

Leo watched him for several long seconds, and wondered if this was what it had felt like for Anders, in those final months in Kirkwall, filled with that warmth and that drive, knowing that the path he walked was one wreathed in shadow. Hawke had been waiting for them on that path, but at some point he had fallen from it; but now he had returned, and everything felt... heavy. Weighted. Electric, like he was about to cast a Tempest in their tent.

It wasn't a bad feeling. Just an unusual one. The Templar prisoners awaited him, and they had never - either of them - balked at the hard decisions. "A minute," he said to Elia, waiting outside, "I just need to find my knife."

* * *

It was the shouting that got Anders out of the bedroll. Not out of sleep - he hadn't done a wink of that. It was loud and not too far away, and it made Fang jerk against him the way only a mabari could.

The sun had risen not so long ago, and with the dawn had come a light most; the entire campsite was dusted with a fine layer of snow, fresh from the night. The campfire had burnt out at some point recently, whichever mage in charge of keeping it lit having neglected to do so; now it was nothing but a large black circle upon the rocky ground. Anders walked through the spot it had been, and onward toward the noise.

As he walked he saw only a handful of other mages, most of whom looked at him only briefly before hurrying past him, back toward the way he had come; their faces were pale, mouths downturned. Anders knew those faces. Hawke's friends had looked at him like that, as they sailed out of a smoking Kirkwall; horror, contempt, but also the knowledge that they could do nothing to him.

He found the shouting in the middle of a large throng of mages, near the portion of the camp the prisoners were being kept in. It sounded like Brevan. "- Absolute _disgrace_! You are everything they warned us about, everything vile - worse than a common murderer, worse than a _demon_ -"

"Oh, Andraste's Knickerweasels," Anders muttered, and pushed through the crowd, which parted for him with far too much easy, so much that he had to check his own momentum a little when he reached the front, so that he did not fall over.

The body sprawled across the floor that he had almost tripped over did not help either.

Curly-haired, pale eyes gaping and silent; Anders couldn't say that he recognized the man _specifically_ but the clothes looked very much like the templar prisoners' outfits, their undertunics and trews. Cleaner, warmer than the mages' robes, at any rate. 

Redder, too, especially with the man's throat opened like that, slashed from one side clean through to the other.

He glanced up sharply, and stopped; attached to every stake, the rest of the prisoners lolled; their throats gaped open to a man - or woman. Twenty nine pairs of unseeing eyes. Anders went to one knee, touched the first prisoner's cheek - waxy and cold, cold enough the fresh fallen snow had not entirely melted on his skin.

"You," and a shadow fell across him; he looked up into Brevan's shaking finger. " _You_."

Now he stood, looking slowly around the gathered crowd; a mix of emotions were worn on the assembled faces - fear, resentment, apprehension, disgust. Brevan was the easiest to read, purple and splotchy; Elia, at his side, was her usual blank; Leo, at the centre of it all, his face a wet mask, was...

Anders looked down at the closest corpse, then back up at Leo. He was just standing there, his knife held in one hand, and the whites of his eyes were stark in his gory face, fixed on Anders with something... something old sparkling in their depths, something Anders had - had known, once. At some point. Brevan backed up a step, shaking, and pointed at Anders and then at Leo, who was watching Anders steadily with that strange, familiar expression on his face.

"You," said Brevan - "You put him up to this."

Anders said, "I beg your pardon?"

"You almost _had_ me," Brevan snarled, stepping back even further. "I almost fell for it, I - I started to _doubt_. But the Chantry was _right_! Everything they said, everything you are - monsters! Murderers! You kill in cold blood, both of you! Andraste said magic must serve man, not _murder him unarmed_!"

Leo said, indifferently, "At least the food problem's not an issue any more."

This caused a string of murmers. Samiha, clutching her robe around her shoulders like a shawl, said - her voice high with surprise - "But what if the templars want _revenge_?"

"It's a bloody cycle," Nkeiru muttered.

"No," said Brevan. "It's _murder_. That's the word, that's the word they'd prefer to avoid, the two of them, these - these _murderers._ " He stepped away, running his hands through his hair, and then spun back on Hawke, finger right back to accusatory jabbing. "They surrendered! _Surrendered_! You knew that!"

"We're at war" Hawke said, flatly. "Surrenders don't mean shit if you don't want them to. I was at the Gallows, I saw the First Enchanter there trying to surrender - did him no fucking good. Hate me if you want - I don't give a shit. Least you have enough food to reach the other rebel mages."

Anders looked at the bodies, then at him. "Leo," he said, faintly, from the back of his throat; twenty-nine bodies. They should have been his. More corpses, thrown on his pyre; he had the poison, back in their tent...

Leo flicked his wrist, one sharp gesture to clear some of the gore from his blade; droplets of red rained down over the snow. The crowd shuffled away, uneasily. Brevan was shaking with rage. "Murderers," he spat, his furious gaze alighting on Anders. "Liars. Monsters! You are not welcome here, we do not need you -"

It was nothing Anders had heard before. The murmers of assent and agreement coming from some of the mages were also nothing new. He touched his chest, fingertips pressing lightly against his breastbone, and looked back out over the corpses, lolling from the stakes they had been tied to; Leo hadn't cut them free before slitting their throats. He looked from Brevan back at the members of the crowd - Samiha, pale and queasy-looking; Nkeiru, her brow drawn; Andreas, blank and indifferent - Charles, Herosa, Lana, Caleb, Margot.. so many faces, so ill at ease. 

He said, "Hawke and I will take our leave on the morrow. We need time to pack." 

"I don't care -" Brevan started to say, and then stopped, narrowing his eyes. "It doesn't matter," he said, coldly; "We'll be gone by midday."

"Brevan," Samiha said, cautiously, "We'll also need time to pack - "

"He's a _fucking_ abomination, Samiha," Brevan spat, spitefulness in every line of his face. "We've all seen him glowing blue. Probably they both are by now. The Chantry tried to warn us about that, too. I'm not risking possession - I've been around him and his _demon_ long enough."

Hawke cleared his throat; Anders glanced over at him sharply, surprised by the unexpected movement. For the last - Maker, year? Two years? However since Kirkwall? - Hawke had kept quiet through however many insults and tirades, seemingly accepting that it was part of changing the world; but now his face was hard and cold, and when he spoke, his voice was clipped. Angry. "If you want to delude yourself into thinking being a 'good' mage who doesn't kill Templars will spare you - I don't give a shit," he said, "Fuck off. Fiona's waiting. Who knows, maybe if you die gracefully enough the Templars might start to feel sad about killing you. But if you spit any further venom at Anders, you will regret it."

Anders said, "Hawke -"

"I'll be in our tent," Hawke said flatly. He raked his eyes over Brevan, top to bottom; and the crowd parted for him with a fluidity Anders _remembered_. He turned back one more time, once he had cleared it, his wolfish amber eyes locking with Brevan's, before sliding on over to meet Anders's; the sheer intensity of his gaze caught Anders's breath in his chest, sent his heart thumping double time, made him... made him _feel_

He reeled, catching himself on one of the stakes; his palm touched something wet and tacky. He barely noticed. Hawke blinked, once, long and slow like a cat; and then he turned back around and continued on his way.

Brevan's mouth twisted; he raised a shaking hand to his forehead, twisting his hair in his fingers. Catching Anders staring at him, he swallowed, once, twice, thrice; and then he said - his voice a thin, high croak, ravaged and worn out, "Leave us. Just... leave us. You've done enough."

Anders could have stayed. Could have argued that - he had done nothing, after all. But there was nothing to be gained from doing so, and he was... tired, of being cruel. Of being petty. It had been useful, before - an act of defiance, of selfishness, in a life that had not allowed him much of either - but now...

He looked over Brevan's shoulder at Elia, standing there quietly with her hands folded in front of her; she returned his gaze unabashed, her face as emotionless as ever. He nodded goodbye to her to her, just the once, and when she returned it, he turned and left. Just like that. 

That easy.

He didn't return to the tent immediately, of course; first he stopped and collected some of the Templar's food rations, just in case. The mages had fanned out from their cluster immediately after he left; he saw them picking through the pile of looted textiles, choosing themselves new clothes to wear; he spotted Caleb trying on a pair of rugged leather boots, and Andreas shrugging into a jerkin adorned with the sword of mercy. His heart ached, a steady pulse. 

He hoped their new things helped them get where they needed to go.

When he ducked his head into their tent, it was to find it already illuminated; veilfire burnt gently away from their cooking pot, which hawke had left on their bedroll with the dog curled around it. Leo himself was sat cross-legged at the end of the bedroll, a great bowl of unmelted snow in the hollow of his legs; when Anders let the tent flap fall behind him, Hawke lifted his chin to meet his eyes.

"I take it they're leaving," he said.

Anders nodded. "They're packing," he said. "They're hoping to be gone by midday."

Hawke didn't blink. "Good," he said. "They should be able to reach the other mages from here. It's a gentler trip north. And they have food now."

Their washcloth was poking out of Hawke's knapsack, grey and grimy; Anders plucked it free and went down to his knees on the bedroll in front of Leo. "Yes," he said, placing a hand on the bowl's edge. "They do." The snow began to hiss as it melted; Anders dipped the cloth in.

Hawke said, "You understand that I'm here for this, right? Until the day we die - we, plural? Collective? Fucking _multiple of_? That I'm not going _anywhere_?" 

"So you've said," Anders said. "Hold still." He passed the cloth briefly over Hawke's face, clearing a clean pink streak over the bridge of his nose; the cloth came back absolutely scarlet after that one short trip. Hawke was grimier than he had thought.

"I chose you, Anders," Hawke said, and moved forward, shoving the bowl roughly to one side; it lolled magnificently over the ground, spilling lukewarm water over Anders's knee before righting itself, making him flinch in surprise. Hawke's thumbs were on his knees, rough and calloused; his eyes were bright and sharp, so close to Anders's face that Anders could feel the breeze from Hawke's exhalations on his lips. He found himself unable to cut his gaze away, to avert his eyes; Hawke had always had a hypnotic effect on him, and here - now, covered in the red of freshly-spilled blood... "I chose you," Hawke said, again. "Revolution and all."

"Leo," said Anders, and wasn't sure what he meant by it. Suddenly he was back on the Wounded Coast, nine years vanished in the blink of an eye; and oh, the blood on Hawke's face came from Ser Karras and his friends, and he was just as ferocious and bold and handsome then as he was now.

The greys didn't change that, Anders realised. Nor the scars. That was... normal. That was... 

That was a sign of the life Leo had chosen to lead, had _chosen_. All this time he had thought - thought that perhaps Hawke hadn't been aware, back then in the Gallows, of what he was agreeing to - _fugitives together_ sounded romantic on paper but Maker, in the flesh anything but, Anders had known that. 

He'd been trying to give Leo an out. Trying to give him another choice, another _chance_ \- because he was a mage, because that was all Anders had ever wanted, for mages everywhere. But Leo had made his long ago, and the only person who hadn't known had been Anders himself.

It was enough to make a man laugh. Or weep. Or both. So instead he settled for doing the next best thing, and he leaned forward, and drew Leo in for a kiss as urgent as it was overdue.

Leo was still coated in blood, and it was tacky against his mouth, and he could taste the salt and the iron on his tongue; Hawke held onto his shoulders like he was afraid Anders might try to bolt, and Anders could think of nothing further from his mind. 

Hawke's teeth were sharp and jagged, wolf's teeth in his mouth, and he tasted of steel and lyrium; tasted the way his magic felt sometimes, like an ocean crashing to the shore. Anders reached up behind Hawke, hooked one arm desperately around Leo's broad shoulders, and cupped the back of Hawke's skull in the palm of his hand; Leo's hair was bristly against his palms, soft and ticklish like his mabari's fur, and - oh, his mouth felt and tasted so good. So _fucking_ good.

"You are magnificent," Anders breathed, when they parted; saw Leo grin that feral grin of his, hard and toothy. It had been too long so he had seen that vicious slash of a smile, sharp as the blade of a knife, and now that he had it in front of him again he could not keep himself from kissing his way along it, his nose nuzzling against Hawke's as he did so, Hawke's breath hot in his mouth.

Leo broke this kiss, breathing heavily; he licked his lips and looked away quickly, the bloody mask smeared here and there where Anders must have disturbed it. He raised a hand to his face, wiped it away quickly - yes, some red here and there; he didn't care, not when the sheer fucking _smell_ of Hawke sent warmth pulsing down between his legs - some part of him miraculously undeterred by revolutions and winters and the mabari, watching them with a curious head tilt on the bedroll. "Hawke," Anders said, quite sharp with urgency. "Love me - send the dog out. Not in that order."

Hawke's eyes were soft, gentle in his harsh face. He lifted his head and said, "Fang - out."

The dog whined, but only once. There was no arguing with Hawke, not like this. Not now.

After all, Anders thought, as he tugged Hawke down, down on the empty bedroll with him - Leo's warmth surrounding him, embracing him, filling him - he knew that better than most.

* * *

They dozed, for a time, until the voices outside the tend faded away and then stopped entirely. Anders, curled against Hawke's back with an arm fitted neatly around his waist, twitched as Hawke pulled free - rolling onto his back, he threw his arm over his eyes, and Hawke looked down at him and knew with a bone-deep certainty that he would kill anyone who tried to come between them.

It wasn't like it was new. He'd known it all along. He'd just... forgotten it for a little while.

Contemplating waking Anders up for another round, he reluctantly decided against it - the wind outside was calm, for now, and it made sense to get packing while the sky was clear. He rolled out of the bedroll, pulling on his clothes as and when he found them; Anders had taken some satisfaction in undressing him last night, and as a consequence his clothing was strewn both far and wide in the tent.

It had been worth it, though. All of it. Even the bites.

He snagged a packet of nuts from the Templar rations Anders had bought home with and ducked his head, stepping out of the tent and stretching both arms up, over his head; his shoulder clicked. The templars were no longer where he had killed them; a series of marks in the snow showed where they had been dragged, a trail that ended in soot; he wandered over to eye the spot thoughtfully, popping some of the nuts in his mouth. The bodies had been burned as they were, no pyre or natural wood used for the burnings. That seemed about right.

"It took about three hours to burn them," someone said behind him, and Leo managed - just about - not to flinch violently enough to fling his nuts everywhere. When he was sure he had himself under control, he schooled his expression into one of bored indifference and turned around.

Lisse was sitting on one of the defensive stakes, her legs swinging idly over thin air; she had a hand on Fang's head, scratching between his ears.

Hawke said, with typical aplomb, "The fuck you still doing here?"

She grinned, a shark-toothed thing; her eyes glittered. "Waiting for you to take me to meet your Dalish friend, is 'the fuck I'm still doing here'," she retorted. "I thought you and Anders were going to be in there _forever_. Does he ever shut up?"

"I like him loud," said Hawke, and then realised it was perhaps not the sort of thing you were supposed to tell a fourteen year old girl.

She just snorted. "You hear far worse in the apprentice dorms all the time at the Circle," she said. "Shortly after I arrived, one of my bunkmates scored a threesome... in the bunk above mine."

Hawke squinted at her. "Weren't you _six_ ," he said.

"Yeah." She shrugged. "Circles."

Leo blew out a long breath. "Not a problem for much longer," he said.

She nodded. "Not for me," she said, "Not for you. Despite what they think."

Hawke looked at her and then at his tent, the canvas shivering in the breeze, in which Anders slept; then looked around the campsite, at the snow and the pines, at the soot where the bodies had burned; at the churned snow where he had slit their prisoners' throats, making the cold decision for the many. There was no sign of the mages. And they had his snowshoes, the bastards. That was fine; he'd done his part - they'd be alright. Ungrateful, but alright.

There were worse things to be than misremembered in the history books of tomorrow's free mages. 

Lisse pushed herself off the stake, adjusting her wolf pelt; the dog climbed to its feet. "Are you done? I want - I want to meet your friend." She glanced down at Fang, where her fingernails dug into the wrinkled skin at the top of his head. "I want to go _home_."

"Yeah," he said. "We're done here."

Time to move on.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes a family is a mother and a father and a little girl. Sometimes there's a father and another father. Sometimes there's a couple of unrepentant killers, the spirit who possesses one of them, a dog who headbutts people in the crotch and a little girl who wants to shank templars when she grows up. Awww. ♥


End file.
